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The Worst Web Design Techniques Featured on Web Pages That Suck in 2005

Brown University Graduate School

Brown University Graduate School — courtesy of the Wayback Machine. You can run but you can't hide. The folks at Brown fixed the site — and made it the way it should have been in the first place. Archive.org has the ugly truth.

Brown University Graduate School — after they fixed it because they won the award.

My original comments: I've stated many times that it's perfectly OK for certain types of web sites (music, movie, band, personal, gaming, and experimental) to use stupid web design techniques because that's what their audience expects. These aren't real sites. A real site is about disseminating information and/or selling products/services.

The Brown University Graduate school is a real site, for a real organization, and it has a Google Page Rank of 8.

This is just awful. You have to mouse over the words (Admissions, Academics, Support, or Student Life) and then over the bars. I can't believe how bad this site is — but not as bad as the original Xbox 360.

I'm especially fond of the lack of contrast between the text and the background.

Reader comments: I love it when webmasters defend the indefensible, because they always come out with the wackiest rationalizations to try to explain their very bad decision.

WEBMASTER 1: No, no, you don't understand! We meant to make the navigation hard to use, to reflect the theme of the site, which is "human struggle throughout the ages!"

WEBMASTER 2: No, we meant to simply load fifteen 1.2 MB images on one page, as opposed to allowing visitors to preview them with a thumbnail gallery. We figured having to click on a thumbnail would be too much of a hassle!

WEBMASTER 3: Yes, we planned to carve up the home page into 5 framesets. This was to allow visitors to manage the site in bite-sized chunks.

WEBMASTER 4: If every site was designed to be maximally usable by all users, the Web would be a boring place."

LOL!

This box nav is probably one of the dumbest things I have ever seen on the web, with the rationalization behind it being the dumbest thing I have ever heard on the web. Let me explain why this menu dumb. It's not even obvious! You would never know those highlighted boxes were links unless you accidentally moused over them or were told beforehand what they were. Why? Because all that happens when you mouseover the text links is that the boxes light up, and there's nothing about the boxes lighting up that tells visitors, "Hey, mouseover us to access different parts of the site." So what's the point of a menu whose function isn't even obvious or self evident when visitors see it?

LOL!

As for the grad student who wrote: "And really, isn't that what matters? That a Grad student at Brown can find what she needs?" NO, what matters is that the target audience for this site—a person who *isn't* a grad student at Brown but is curious in becoming one— can browse this site to learn more information about it in the quickest, and most user-friendly way possible. This site wasn't designed for students of Brown— it was designed for non-students of Brown. I know you want to defend your school and everything, but this menu is ridiculous and even a bit unprofessional.

I had my daughter check out the Brown Grad web site.

She is definitely in the "target demographic" as she is an undergrad at an private school on the Upper West side of MYC. She is also computer literate; having used computers since age 9. She also knows more about surfing than the average person since Mom and Dad build web sites.

Her initial reaction to this Brown site was confusion. She could not figure out how to start navigating. Then, when did, she said: "What the..." as the little boxes appeared.

Some things should be boring. For instance, I don't want excitement when I'm trying to find the controls to my car stereo in traffic. One thing is for certain: if web sites were designed to be maximally usable, they'd certainly be more usable ... something which is very badly needed.

People seeking entertainment generally have a wide assortment of computer games to choose from. The odds are that they're on a commercial web site (yours included) to seek information instead. When entertaining them with "creative" forms of navigation interferes with their quick and easy access to that information, the web site fails. It's a case of a designer putting his desires ("I think we should entertain the users") ahead of the user's needs ("I need information on application deadlines for fall"). But the user is solely interested in his own needs, and a site which doesn't meet them in a way as to be maximally usable by that user is one more impediment between your hand and his wallet.

In the end, it's all about the Benjamins.

Actually what counts is that anyone who needs to can find the information they need. That's not just students, that's potential students, their parents, anyone advising potential students and parents of potential students... this list goes on. Some people will find this site great and cool and stuff, while others will find it confusing.

It is actually possible to create a site that is both visually pleasing and functional. The "we've never seen this kind of navigation before" argument can actually be cited as a point against it. To reiterate the car theme again, a friend of mine once bought a second-hand Citroen MX, brushed aside all offers of a quick guided tour of the dashboard, got in and couldn't find the handbrake. Why? Because it wasn't where the handbrake should be, it was next to his left knee. This had to be explained to him before he could test drive the damn thing.

Lots of things are standard. The buttons on your telephone are in a particular configuration. And if you've ever been overseas and gone into an internet café where the keyboards are all different, it slows you down.

It's generally far better to concentrate on taking the ordinary and making it useful and exciting than to completely ditch the established standards — that should be left to the artists and designers, whose web sites are supposed to push the envelope and be a little bit crazy. If someone hits upon a great idea that looks cool and is intuitive and useful, it'll be noticed and will spread through the net.

Also, the more complicated you make something, the more there is to go wrong. Using IE6 on WinXP at 1024px screen width, try activating the "Support" menu, run your mouse over the submenu until it's just below the "Student life" link and then up to activate the "Student life" link. Then do what most people would do at this point: carefully, without touching any of the inactive blue boxes, move your mouse pointer to the new submenu boxes and try activating them. I don't know about you, but I find I can't then read any of the labels at all — occasionally I see a stray letter over to the right and that's it.

And that's the danger with this sort of thing: when it works perfectly, it appears very cool and neat. But when it doesn't work quite perfectly, it suddenly becomes totally useless.

All I can say is that if I ever received a page menu like this from one of my students, I would flunk the project and make them do another.

Although I can see that there are several sub-menus you are attempting to display it could have been done in a much more effective way.

It would be impossible to browse this web site with a text based browser as there are no text based alternatives to your menu system.

There would be no excuse acceptable for such a horrendous navigational experiment on a professional web site.

UPDATE

Brown decided to muck up the university's front page. This led to Brown becoming the Daily Sucker for August 21. Here's the commentary:

Submitter's comments: As an avid reader of your work, I am eager to share with you Brown University's latest misguided and incoherent foray into web design. Clearly the staff members of Brown's Public Affairs and University Relations division have learned nothing from their previous failed use of "Mystery Meat Navigation" on the Brown Graduate School pages.

In fact, this time they have used it as the central focus of the university's new main web page—a page that is both poorly designed and overwhelmingly difficult to use. As someone who has worked at Brown, this is another sad example of a division (that is ostensibly in charge of the university's image) proudly trumpeting a poor design concept despite the protests and recommendations of its main users: students and staff. When a design division ignores the needs its main audience and is not accountable for its actions, this is the unfortunate result.

The site is being previewed, but will be the main site (www.brown.edu) by September 10.

Vincent's comments: Brown, Brown, Brown. It's one thing for your graduate school to be winner of the "Worst Web Design Techniques Featured on Web Pages That Suck in 2005" award, but do you have to muck up the front page of such a prestigious school with your latest redesign?

I have no idea whether or not the statements about the students and staff protesting the design are true. However, when I saw the new home page, here's what went through my mind:

  1. Jeez! That's a lot of s**t-brown color on a page.
  2. Damn! This has to be one huge-a** page. (397,555 bytes, it turns out)
  3. Where's the blankety-blank focus?

Mousing over any section brings up an image and some text. It's distracting, to say the least, and it keeps me from focusing on what's important on the page. Oh, what is important on the page? I'm not sure and I think this is where the page falls apart. I looked at the left-hand topics and after thinking about their order, decided that this was probably the logical arrangement of topics (the location of "Research" still bothers me).

What really bother me is that on my monitor the right-hand links from "Alumni" to "Administrative Offices" move up the screen when I mouse over them. In the case of "Alumni" it looks like the links are "Campaign for Academic Enrichment" and "Annual Fund." When you mouse over the links in the top groups, the picture does not move the links.

I showed the page to my wife, expressed my concerns, and asked her what she thought about the page. Her answer was brilliantly succinct "It's too complicated."

One reason for its complexity is they went out of their way to make sure the page is Valid XHTML Strict. As I've said before, you can get hung up on the validity of your code. With their current home page having a GooglePageRank of 9, there's very little they can do.

Brown is very keen on every department following a template guideline. The templates are quite functional and help bring some uniformity and reign in those who want to be creative but have no talent.

The new Brown University home page

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