I wish I could say something more encouraging, but the new website is overall negative in my view. It’s full of distracting things where some web designer is showing off gimmicks. It all detracts from the core message, the substance of the site. It was obviously designed by people focusing on having the facade of a “modern website” totally oblivious to actual user experience. Just a few specifics:
- “There are better voting methods” (plural) jumps to a page about one single voting method
- “Join our Movement” is the main button but anyone who already wants to join will find out how, and anyone new is not ready to join having read one sentence.
- And joining asks for an email with “sign me up” button with no clarity about what I’m actually signing up for!! (Is it a newsletter?) — it would even make more sense to encourage people to join this forum. Signing up for a newsletter does not feel like joining a “movement”.
- “About” is a menu, there’s no plain landing page for “about” for people who don’t know what they are looking for yet (all the other menu items click to go somewhere)
- “Problem and solution” does an annoying animated gimmick, it takes some energy and time to figure out what to do to read anything meaningful, the left-side is a bunch of jargon, clicking on one makes a white-on-light-green non-standard, strangely shaped block of far-too-small text show up in the circle on the right. The circle even has a gradient so the middle is white text on even-lighter green. The text bits are not themselves inspiring or convincing even. And then having looked at this, the prompt is to donate!
- Everything from the color design to the animations to the layout is overall bad
This goes on and on. The whole design seems mostly wrong at all levels from superficial color and interaction details to the entire conceptual design of how / where / what visitors are expected to use the site. I could use this as a good demonstration prototype of how to fail at web design.
I guarantee you a ton of visitors to the new site (my hypothesis: a strong majority) will click a few times around the site and just feel kinda frustrated and not a good experience, give up, and leave.
I am myself annoyed enough from my time looking at the site that I feel like saying more about how obviously misguided the designers were and how their priorities are in all the wrong places. I don’t want to be harsh, but your website caused me a bunch of extra annoyance.
Even the one thing that makes me feel good, the " Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License" in the footer does an obnoxious animation of the underlining when I hover over it. It feels like someone poking me to notice that websites can have animation. It offers only a distraction. It doesn’t help me learn about anything or about the license.
Go sit down with any random person and observe them exploring your site, ask them to just speak their thoughts out loud as you see them painfully try to engage with it.
I’d almost say I’m glad I didn’t donate because putting money toward this website would have been a very bad use of my limited resources.
I can’t find anything redeeming to say, I’m sorry. Well, I could say that this forum is designed much better, so I will still engage here. If not for this forum, the new site would probably have, in practice, caused the loss of my participation in the movement in that I don’t want to visit the site and I can’t even feel okay linking anyone to the website anymore, even though I strongly support the movement.
I’m trying to be constructive, but there’s so much wrong, it’s a lot of work to just explain it. I would not have put in the work to write all this if I didn’t really care about the organization and movement.
All sorts of articles about good design are out there, ones that focus on actual human usability instead of caricatures of the latest superficial fashions in web tech.