Usability: May 2008 Archive Page

Seton Hill recently unveiled a new home page.

The internal pages all seem to be unchanged, so the changes were not radical, but they were welcome.

I have a little quibble with this semi-transparent fold-up menu. The menu itself is a good idea, which lets the designers re-use the artwork created for our print and billboard ad campaigns.  Presumably the prospective students and their families are the ones who are most interested in the artwork -- the rest of us have seen it before.  So overlaying this menu on some of the space reserved for non-functional artwork is a good decision -- these images and these links will both be of interest to the same visitors.

The blue stripe I've added to the image is a dead zone -- click there, and nothing happens.  There's also a dead zone at the end of the line after the text ends.  Everywhere else on the page, the whole rectangular block where a menu item lives is an active button, so the different functionality of this menu widget gets a slight usability penalty.

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