Home Page Impact:
First impressions are a little mixed. Although this is clearly a tennis website, the design aesthetics are more akin to a video gaming website. The gun metal effect navigation panel and masthead combined with a black background does not automatically suggest international tennis.
Clarity / Navigation:
Navigation is positioned comfortably on the left of the page. However, the navigation options are hard to read because the condensed capitalised magenta text on the black background does not provide sufficient contrast to make it clear and visible to all users.
Moving the mouse over the navigation causes pop-out secondary sub navigation to appear suddenly. Some precise mousing is required here in order to keep the sub menu open and hit the right link. When using this type of animated navigation a visual clue should be used to communicate that the menu item has further underlying sub navigation.
By contrast, elsewhere hypertext links use the standard underline and can be easily identified despite the use of a very small font size (what does this mean?).
News:
The News Archive page displays a very long scrolling list of approximately one hundred news headlines covering the last two months. Users often abandon pages like this because they don't allow them to refine their search. A more usable approach would be if the News Headlines were grouped and navigated by date parameters i.e. July 12-18 | July 19-25.
No 'Print Friendly' or 'Email a Friend' features were available. Using the browser 'Print Preview' option printed off a news article satisfactorily without the black background but with web page remnants i.e. navigation and other graphical elements.
Search feature:
The site features a limited player search function titled 'Find Player'. The input field is far too small and only allows nine characters to be typed in before scrolling begins. This field should be much wider given the character length of some eastern European players' names.
The search action button 'Go' is so small it is no longer legible. The following search result page can be long if searching by Christian name instead of family name. Although a useful A-Z Player listing page can be accessed this option only appears if no result is found.
Shopping:
The shopping feature 'Player Gear' appears in the sub menu of 'Players'. This is not an immediately obvious place to find a link to the shop and should appear in the primary navigation if it is to be found easily by many users. The 'Player Gear' page features a list of players with associated products. Each product has a hyperlink (Order Now) placed opposite, it would be more helpful to make the product name the hyperlink. Selecting an 'Order Now' link launches a second browser window. This new browser window features the selected product within a new e-commerce partner's web site 'tennis-warehouse.com'. The current functionality tends to happen unexpectedly and without warning, this can be disconcerting for users. More could be done to introduce the commerce partner earlier and to communicate where the product links will take the user so helping to maintain a more seamless user experience.
Video/Audio:
The site features a multimedia section but this is disappointingly limited to just two items of video titled WTA Tour Theatre. It is not clear how often new video is produced and made available. The video players available are Real Media and Windows Media. Both functioned seamlessly within the web page with a clear picture and audio, and without any problems on a broadband connection. However, when reviewed only the Real Media download video option worked. The Windows Media Player option referenced a web page that was unavailable.
Overall:
In conclusion, the website has a rather unusual design that sometimes impacts the clarity of both content and navigation. To an extent the choice of colours and the resulting reduced contrast creates a further lack of visual clarity. Page titles are not clear due to the drop shadow treatment.
The WTA Tour site is fairly easy to navigate despite the sometimes tricky pop-out navigation and the lack of clarity due to the graphical effects used. Some menu options have been repeated i.e. Press Releases. This suggests that some rationalisation is required in order to simplify the navigation structure.
Return to newsletter
|
