Version B

By Jakob Nielsen, May 1995

The month name was now more prominent and was seen by the users. Also, they understood that "News and Commentary" was clickable. Adding the blue {MORE} button to the lead paragraph made it very clear to the users that there was more information and that they could click on the button to get to it.

Users still often misunderstood the status of this page, believing that it was a page about Adobe and not Sun's home page. Based on this observation, we decided to make the Sun logo much more prominent on all subsequent designs. The downside of our new design with a new cover story every month is that the cover story easily takes over from the "Sun" identity and dominates the page.

Users generally liked the design and particularly praised the use of a dominating purple color to frame the page. Terms used to describe the page included "pretty," "nice looking," "looks professional" (the user contrasted this page with "much on the Web looks like something people put together in a night"), "very professional part of the corporate persona," "cohesive presence," and "a very macho home page." Users liked that they were not inundated with a lot of choices that they had to read through (one user referred to the design as "not very crowded - more like a hub with spikes and a central message"). Confirming results from previous studies, many users were highly appreciative of the fact that the page would fit on a single screen.

Compared with the first iteration, some usability problems had been fixed: users easily discovered the month name (and they all liked the fact that the page was dated), they understood that they could get more information about the lead story by clicking on {MORE}, and they also easily found the search feature (many users appreciated the easy access to search). Furthermore, more users understood that they could click on the individual stories under News & Commentary for more information, but most users still were attracted to clicking on the News & Commentary bar before clicking on the individual stories. A few users thought that they could only click on the News & Commentary bar and that the individual stories were not clickable, leading us to increase the clickability affordance of the stories in subsequent designs (we finally ended up including blue keywords in each story to indicate their hypertext nature).