In a vague attempt to combat the winter-induced sleep addiction that hangs from my eyelids each night when I get home, I thought I’d take a quick look at cinema listings. Obviously it’s much more worthwhile to walk to the end of the road and sit in a different seat for a couple of hours being entertained.
I couldn’t really find anything that appealed to me (that I hadn’t already seen). However, I did notice that Prince Charles have redesigned their site recently, and the new version is really well structured and easy to use. I think they’ve done a great job of presenting lots of information in one place without leaving you feeling like you don’t know where to look. I tend to be a little short-sighted and tired this time of night, but could intuitively get what I needed without thinking about it at all.
In constrast, the Curzon site manages to incorporate most of my pet hates about design. They have much less information on the page, but leave you feeling stressed and unsure what to look at. There’s no kind of visual hierarchy to guide the eye (everything in upper case), so you have to read most of the content to work out which piece to look at. The cherry on top is a layer of pointless and annoying animation.
I think you really have to consider your situation when making decisions around design. Cinema sites are purely functional, so I’d like to be able to get the information I want as quickly and efficiently as possible. I really don’t think animation works well in this context at all.
Anyway, as you can gather I ended up ranting about design instead of going to the cinema. Fool. At least I get to test out my tasty new keyboard.
