No Gold Medal for the London 2012 website
November 1, 2009 11:52 am RandomI am a web developer and I have written some bad sites in my time, I know the difficulties and constraints involved but if you’re creating the site for London 2012, the pinnacle of sporting excellence, to be browser global and to encourage people to participate (volunteer, come and watch, write about it etc…) then you want a good website!
When we tried this out the other day (OK about 5 minutes ago, it annoyed me so much I had to write about it straight away) there were so many usability issues with it I just couldn’t believe it, especially after the Sydney Olympics site got taken to court over their site! Now is this the fault of the designer/implementers or those that contracted them? Well who knows?
Who decided that you had to have a ‘screen name’ for your blog posts when you register? Am I ever going to post on their site? I don’t dare even try now after the experience so far! and who decided that good feedback to the user would be ‘that name is taken try another’ (without any prompt towards what isn’t yet taken?) give it a few more months and people will be there for days trying to come up with a new unique (yet totally unnecessary) screen name.
Is my ethnic origin really needed? my gender doesn’t appear to be, I certainly hope that all this is being properly protected under the Data Protection Act!
We gave up after a page with a map of the UK which said ‘click anywhere to start’, where there was only a bit of southern England and northern Scotland poking out from behind the ‘click to start message’ which was actually click-able.
Perhaps whoever was responsible for this (the entire chain of responsability!) should have gone to DevDays! It seems they might have learnt a lot!
So no Gold Medal for the London Olympic website, lets hope this site is, well training for the main event, hopefully they’ll go away and do more practice and by the time people really need to use it for the main event but if the developers (and those responsible for them) don’t show the same dedication as the athletes who’ll be taking part then we could look like a bunch of amateurs.