Today we went through an exercise about website design and looking through different websites to explore how they convey information.
To do this, we were given a scenario which involved finding a coffee place to go to with a friend who's passionate about coffee. The three main requirements we were looking to fulfill in these websites were:
- If they sold flat white coffee.
- If they sold Columbian Coffee Beans.
- If the company was independent.
For this exercise, we looked at the Websites for three different coffee shops; Starbucks, Prufrock and Coffee Island
➊ Could the sites do anything better to present the actual interior atmosphere of their shop?
I felt that the websites could've benefitted from having more pictures of the locations to give us a better visual representation of what we would find upon entry. As far as I could see, Prufrock got the closest to doing this, but it still wasn't a good representation of what I would see if I walked in.
➋ Were there any other qualities about the different sites that this activity didn't take into account?
Due to the fact that this exercise was mostly focused on coffee, it ended up largely ignoring the food side of things. This was a bit of a missed opportunity, as food should be another half of the equation of what makes a good café, not just the drinks.
Out of the three websites, I would say that Prufrock did the best job at representing this, due to having an entire menu tab with set prices and ingredients lists for all items clearly visible.
Starbucks had a menu on their site as well, but there was no real prices mentioned, only nutritional information and brief descriptions.
This can be a little understandable though, as Starbucks is a big franchise with many locations, whereas Prufrock is an independent coffee place with only one set location.
➌ If you were asked to work with a team to build a new coffee shop's website - which example would you be more influenced by?
If I were to do this, I would base my design on Coffee Island, as overall, it had the most appealing layout and visuals in my personal opinion. Some of my favourite parts of this website was the icon and loading bar that appears when you first open the website and the sliding transition into the website homepage, which really looked visually interesting and dynamic.
➍ If you were making a site for a different purpose, what sort of 'scenario' would you create to test examples?
A scenario I could think of doing would be in the case of buying a gift for a loved one.
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