KonzeptioNerd

Remember deep pages

Netbank has been in the newsletters with its relaunch the “largely avoids scrolling”.

Now, this claim is not quite true to the point: deep, content-heavy pages do scroll - and why shouldn’t they? (See e.g. Boxes and Arrows: Blasting the Myth of the Fold).

There are more severe blunders on the Netbank site, though. Linked and unlinked teasers in the right-hand column are hardly distinguishable. “News” teasers on the homepage deeplink to pages that are not accessible through the site’s main navigation (but, rather, via a link in the small-print footer navigation). The large teasers on the homepage do, unexpectedly, not deeplink into the section anchored in the main navigation, but open tools in new windows.

Those tools (an open account-function and a credit calculator) open not in popups, but as full pages in new windows. The layout of these pages is very similar to the layout of the content pages. However, what looks like a left-hand column navigation (2) is in fact a progress bar (1). I wonder how many visitors try to click it, hoping to continue browsing the site content when they find the calculator is not what they need at this point.

Learning: the frustration of low usability will continue to annoy when the brief Wow! of the homepage has long faded.

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