Journal Entry #2 – Website Analysis

My partner and I chose T-mobile as our analysis target.

To start the evaluation, we started from the general looking of its homepage. T-mobile has a pretty neat and functional homepage design. It simply shows the different categories for users. The most interesting part of the homepage is it has a movable bar at the right corner for different phone rate plans. After selecting the desired package, by dragging the bar, user could see how many minutes they get, and how much money they need to pay. It is a brilliant time-saving feature which allows user to see it on the site’s homepage without digging further. Also, every new phone, plan and promotion even could be seen on the homepage, and the homepage still does not seem too crammed by giving too much information.

Compare with its competitor, Sprint, whose homepage tries to deliver everything, seems getting the oppsite effect, users could easily feel overwhelmed by its clutter page, and feel totally lost. The rate page is hidden deeply in the site, and is shown by a full page of different chart tables. It takes a lot of time and patience for users to understand how much they need to pay and what service they could get by different choice of package selections.

As for the critical phone shopping page, where a visitor evaluates potential devices for purchase, T-mobile offers a concrete information in a side-by-side comparison. Devices and plans are presented together, eliminating duplicate page viewings making the ease of purchase.  Users browse different phones by different criterion, without too much details on the page (users can click into the page to see the phone description), it has a standard yet clear page for the phone shoppers.

From the rest of the categories (plans, service, accessories, coverage and support), it’s easy to tell T-mobile’s website has a clean palette applies to the design of the whole site. Each first page of each category looks similar: varies of products devided by blocks, it’s pink and white, it’s easy to find the info, and it contains everything it is supposed to contain. The designer did a good job to make this website has a consistent feeling.

From the “Coverage” category, T-mobile website offers an interactive coverage maps by using Flash. It gives users the ability to zoom, filter and navigate site visuals, which rendering both static and dynamic maps and legible and engaging.

Overall speaking, T-mobile is a website that does not try to impress its users by abundance of images and text boxes, its designers embraces the power of white space, imparting a sense of freedom and mobility to users. Clean lines, simple shapes, and strategic color accents have been chosen to help guide users through the site. Promotional areas are carefully structured to deliever key offerings without undue distraction, strategically targeting users’ specific needs and interests. Through the whole site, textual and graphical elements strike a gentle balance. It is a beautiful and useful website where users could immediately comprehended the site structure and complete tasks without confusion.

Reference:

Frog design (2000). Case study. T-Mobile website strategy and design. Retrieved Oct 14, 2008, from http://www.frogdesign.com/case-study/t-mobile-website-strategy-and-design.html

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Usability #1: Haggen’s
• Designing for Usability on your Homepage
• Top 10 Home Page Guidelines