MAN Group Homepage Comment
by Kristoffer Bohmann, June 4, 2001
Skilled incompetence: MAN Group show how homepages should not be designed. Worst usability mistake: The navbar simply disappears when you change the browser window size a few times.
www.man.de
Insufficient Company and Product Info
The MAN Group homepage is a good example on how homepages should not be designed. Entering the homepage is hard since you must first choose German or English language in a very disturbing Flash animation. I recommend that multi-national sites use English as default language Problems found directly on the homepage include:
- The homepage does not make it obvious that MAN Group is one of Europe's largest manufacturers. This information would be nice since company size and market position are important success factors when attracting business parters, investors, and job applicants.
- Products receive insuffient attention. For instance, motives on product pictures are unclear to outsiders and the picture would benefit if a written explanation was available. Also, the pictures are not clickable thereby forcing users to access product pages through a hard to use drill-down menu that is only visible when the mouse is held over each picture.
- Less relevant topics receive too much attention. A so-called Specials(?) section occupy close to 25 percent of the available pixels on my screen. Also News and stock get a lot of exposure, while the actual products are close to absent (unless you use the mouse). The implicit assumption seems to be that News, Specials, and stock price are the three most important things the company has to say.
- News and current stock price are shown as rolling texts thereby becoming very dominating in the interface. The interaction between the two sections is particularly noisy since News is rolling in vertical direction, while the stock price bar is rolling horizontal. As a result, users focus their attention in the page bottom and are likely to oversee the navigation bar in the upper part of the page.
Fatal Error: Navbar Disappears
A fatal error occur if I stretch the homepage a couple of times. The primary navigation bar simply disappears and users will not be able to navigate important sections on the site. Ups!
Rarely Needed Information
Rarely needed information about last update and browser compatibility occupy valuable pixels.
- Last update is not necessary since a date already is shown in the news section. Instead, publish frequently if you want to appear updated.
- Information about browser compatibility belongs to an error message since users don't care about plug-ins when they have them.
Navigation Sucks
Users don't always know where to click since non-standard link colors and interaction methods are used. For instance, some of the elements in the drill-down menu are only visible on mouse over and will never be seen by impatient users. Perhaps MAN Group only wants to do business with skilled mouse users who can use advanced drill-down menus.
Search. Users must remove the words Keyword search manually before they can search. The words should be removed completely. I searched for vehicle and found a page from an annual report, not a product page.
Navigation also suffers since weird words are used for section titles. The About-section is labelled Portrait. Jobs are called Job board. And, again, I failed to understand the category Specials....
The back-button doesn't work. Novice users who click a page will not be able to go back to the homepage and are likely to give up using the entire site. The technical problem is inaccurate use of frames. Remember to load the entire frameset if you insist on using frames. Otherwise the backbutton is destroyed.
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About the Author
Kristoffer Bohmann (biography) M.Sc. thinks and writes about high-quality user experiences. His philosophy: Users first. You can contact him at kb@bohmannusability.com. |
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