Reviewing Woorkup.com
Recently two big design community sites have been redesigned, Woorkup.com (earlier woork.blogspot.com) and Smashing Magazine, very popular sites among designers. Smashing magazine redesign has disappointed me but I am glad to see the new face of Woorkup.com. Design is really cool and clean. However I think there are some following usability issues.
Navigation
Navigation is the most important part of any site and one can’t afford to be ambiguous here. Each navigation item should project its meaning correctly. Web design here sounds as a service and Community feels like some group of people at woorkup, which are actually blog categories. As to Submit News a wordpress login screen appears. That’s weird! As a first time user how would I know where and how to register to submit news. RSS Feeds should be RSS Feed. I don’t think that main navigation should take me away from the main site without giving me any hint. RSS Feeds and Advertise do that. The main navigation of a site is supposed to present me with a navigation within the site and not outside. In comparison A List Apart navigation has been designed intelligently and purposefully.
Sub-Navigation
Tags for the posts form sub-navigation at Woorkup. Names like: Apple, Browsers, Documentation, News, etc. makes little sense as navigation and displaying all your tags as navigation doesn’t seem a good idea to me. I’ve read Designing web navigation by James Kalbach and he has given very logical explanation about how to design navigation.
Emphasis
Woorkup has brought new style of emphasizing text in its redesign. Highlighting text with color and border. Creative, but its too much of emphasizing. Its taking my eyes off from other text in para and forcing me to look at it. Why not use Italics and bold which are specifically made to serve the purpose and are widely recognized.
Call-to-action
Nice call-to-action buttons inviting users to click. But I never thought that Request an invite will launch my email program and I’ve to write a request email with no instruction about what to write. For Add a new post, an unexpected wordpress login screen shows up. Both these actions provide no background about why to ‘Request an invite’, because I can read the posts without being a member via feed-reader and for ‘Add a new post’, I wonder what username and password to enter and how to join (since I am not a member yet). Both these action buttons should explain more, like, why to request an invite, what is its procedure and benefits; if I have to send an email as request invitation, what info I need to provide. These call-to-action buttons should be made more logical for users.
Single post
Now coming to the actual content of the site. Posts. Every post is accompanied by an author picture (most of them are Antonio’s). Do we really need that? What is more important for a reader? Post title or author’s picture? I think post title will be lot easier to scan without author’s picture. Comments link under posts is surprisingly no more a link in woorkup. Rather Tags and Share on twitter which are actually links don’t feel so after I tried clicking on comments. Links should stand out and feel more like links.
RSS link has been placed at all main sections of the site: header, content, sidebar and footer. Come on this is too much of asking for subscribing RSS. Again I would refer A List Apart (which is undoubtedly the best design community site) where they have mentioned Feed just once.
These are few points I have noticed in woorkup.com which I think needs improvement.
# Josh
says on November 08
# Marc
says on December 05