London Olympics Website Fails to Impress

It’s always interesting to see what a difference ten years can make in the world of web technology, so with the Olympics now upon us, we took a look at the Events website to see how it compares to that of the Winter Olympics 2002 site.

The London 2012 website closely adheres to the Homepage usability guidelines set forth by Danish usability consultant Jakob Nielsen.  This in itself is very significant, as Nielsen had previously rated the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics site very poorly.

The current site is vastly improved in terms of accessibility, however it loses points for having a lot of its material presented in PDF download format.  Whilst useful for presenting information to those in the know, requiring an external download will be an obstacle for many users.

This isn’t the only flaw however.  The site has been designed to have the Homepage’s logo displayed in a different colour upon each page load, which has the potential to confuse users who may think they have browsed to the wrong page.

Whilst a huge improvement over the 2002 site, it goes to show that even a large organisation such as the one that headed the 2012 Olympics can get things wrong in terms of usability.

• Tagged in:
• Design
• Usability
• UX (User Experience)