ConFigures

Attention waste

Most of the time I’d rather point to good examples than spend anyone’s time talking about bad ones.  But I’m mystified at the ACM’s new beta site – they have Special Interest Groups for Design of Communication (SIGDOC) and Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), after all.  Why would such an organization put up a site with a big eye-catching image near the top with highlighted words which look clickable but aren’t — words mostly redundant with the text below?

It seems like home page pollution to put a useless distracting graphic near the top.  Poor design wastes time and attention.  At least they didn’t add pointless animation.

It’s great that they’re doing a beta first and have a nice online form for feedback, though, and I did fill it out with some specific constructive suggestions (and applause for the parts I did like).