Design Critique: ClickCaster
January 27, 2006
Pete Davis, the Chief Marketing Officer of ClickCaster, Inc., wrote to me last week asking if I could evaluate their site which is a competitor of Odeo (my take on Odeo). While my schedule doesn't allow me to go as indepth as I would like with an evaluation (money talks ;-), I thought it would be a great exercise to point out some issues I have with the site and then open it up to everyone so hopefully they could walk away with some new ideas and improve the site.
Navigation
Without a doubt if they only fix one thing on the site it has to be the navigation. There are a ton of places where you can get cute with things and the navigation isn't one of them. Lose the waves and figure out how many levels of navigation you really need.
The waves are too confusing to understand where you are on the site and if they are even clickable or not. Navigation should blend with the site in my opinion and not dominate or confuse.
Copy
The copy on the site needs to be improved as well. Looking at the homepage I see two paragraphs and both of them start off with "Imagine...". I don't want to imagine, I want to "do". Figure out what the purpose of the site is and what you want your users to do and help them do it quickly and easily. Avoid the marketing fluff.
Login Form
The ability to login takes up 80% of the top part of the site. What happened to a simple user/pass form?
ClickCasts vs. Podcasts
On the homepage I have Featured ClickCasts and Featured Podcasts. What this leads to is total confusion because the difference between the two is not readily apparent. Basically there are just too many elements on this page fighting for attention. Nothing dominates the page and lets the user know what your intentions are.
Overall
The site just lacks that crispness displayed from professional sites. I'm sure someone else can elaborate a bit better on this, but from a professional web user's perspective it's hard to trust a site that isn't professionally designed (of course that could just be me).
Your thoughts?
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