Stripping out the stuff that is not a verifiable statement of fact...
146372263 wrote:
So I go to the Paizo website because I want to know where to find a Pathfinder game....
There is no obvious link telling me how to play
There is no obvious link telling me where to find a game.
There is no obvious link telling me what Pathfinder even is.
The center of the screen contains the most recent release, which at the moment is an issue of Kobold Quarterly.
While you criticized D&D's website for having 45 links, I find over 90 links on Paizo's homepage.
So where to go next? Well, there's three logos for Paizo, one for the game, one for the "Society" and one for the "Beginning Box". But there's also an entire column of Pathfinder choices. The Beginner Box isn't included in those choices. Does that mean it's been discontinued? Or maybe the Beginner Box is something different?
Anyway, there's an entry under the Pathfinder category that says "Paizo games". Okay, that seems my best bet at this point to find a game.
Wrong. It leads me to a webpage sellign minis and board games. Opps.
Okay. I go back. Let's try that Pathfinder logo.
Nope. Nothing on how to find a game. Nothing even to direct me to another link on how to find a game.
So I go to the Pathfinder FAQ. "Where can I find a game" might be a frequently asked question, right?
Wrong. Nothing there. Okay. Next stop. Let's try that Pathfinder Society logo we saw.
Better. That discusses organized play, which requires me to play in their campaign world, sort of like Living Forgotten Realms.
So, it's a little confusing, but I get the idea that the faction page will help me find a game nearby.
Nope.
Maybe I have to join the Society first...
Paywall!
There seems to be no way to find a Pathfinder game near me without becoming a member of their site.
Now, I am not saying that paizo has a bad website. It does a great job of selling online books, and the Pathfinder beginner Box has a permanent logo on the front page. But at other things, it is awful. The webpages are cluttered with links in triple the number as found on the Wizards pages. It has an eye-irritating amount of white space that tends to look amateurish.
Don't get me wrong. Paizo has a very good site. What this does show, however, is that it is impossible to design a website that can please everyone. Wizards and Paizo have sites that will pelase a large number of people. Some people will scoff at Paizo's white space and the impossibility of finding a game. Others will scoff at Wizards' reliance on large visuals to draw you in.
There is no ideal website. And Wizards use to have a godawful website. But the current layout is, in my opinion, very good, and about as good as it can get without sacrificing other useful info.
It's two clicks from the main page.
1. www.wizards.com/dnd. Click on "Find a Game". One click
2. Click on "Meetups". Two click.
Nope. Let's assume shortest distance to findding, as I mentioned, a local meetup:
Splash page (layer 1).
/click the Find a Game tab
Okay, the 'find a game' tab is open (layer 2). At this point, there are over 55 clickable surfaces on the page, and the top three of the open tab are not going to lead you to local meetups. The open subtab, in fact, is that for Encounters, leading new players to likely go there first. But let's assume our theoretical user reads the whole page first, and manages to figure out which sub tab to open. That's:
/click the Meetup Groups tab
Here we are on (layer 2.5), the correct sub-tab. Oops, we still have to click the 'Learn More' sub-sub-button to actually get where we need to go.
/click the 'Learn More' text
And now we're on (layer 3) the actual meetup map, except it defaults to a global map, reuiring, not unreasonably, that we throw in our zip code and...
/click the search button
Which finally gets us to our local games (layer 4).
Minimum of four clicks, not the two erroneously claimed, and four layers down, in this most optimistic model. That's not very good design.
To date, all the critiques I have seen of this website design have parroted an article written by someone who knows nothign of website design.
Incorrect, as I don't know what article you're talking about, and hadn't looked up anyone else's critiques of this site so I did a quick google search and found that others have shared my concerns. I have no idea to which version of the webpage the article you're referring to was pointing.
I am not a professional website designer. I do have some professional experience in database GUI design, and a Ph.D. in, amongst other things, cultural studies, at the university where I teach classes in composition and rhetoric. That doesn't make me the end-all authority on communication, by any stretch, but it does give me some confidence in my judgments of how the site is failing to reach potential new customers with what I see as a cluttered and confusing design scheme.
Minimum of four clicks, not the two erroneously claimed, and four layers down, in this most optimistic model. That's not very good design.
We're both wrong -- it's three clicks, because you don't click on the first page. (Otherwise, the least number of clicks you could have are two.)
I am not a professional website designer. I do have some professional experience in database GUI design, and a Ph.D. in, amongst other things, cultural studies, at the university where I teach classes in composition and rhetoric. That doesn't make me the end-all authority on communication, by any stretch, but it does give me some confidence in my judgments of how the site is failing to reach potential new customers with what I see as a cluttered and confusing design scheme.
And I am equally confident that your opinions are faulty. I have yet to see a better website design for a company that sells games. Things can always improve, but nobody has a magical formula for this.
I did a quick google search and found that others have shared my concerns.
Can you link to those "others"? I went to the paizo forums to find the criticism of the website that I saw shortly after the redesign, which is what I assumed you were discussing, but it seems to have been removed. So you must have seen other criticisms.
I did a quick google search and found that others have shared my concerns.
Can you link to those "others"? I went to the paizo forums to find the criticism of the website that I saw shortly after the redesign, which is what I assumed you were discussing, but it seems to have been removed. So you must have seen other criticisms.
Linked to in the orignal thread. Relevant quote: "Modern 'web 2.0' principles recommend a minimalist layout that helps the user find what he wants, rather than what the publisher wants the user to find. Nobody comes to a website to read advertising billboards."
The Paizo forum material I googled I can't find now, so I have no idea to which edition of the website they referred. But their gist was that Wizards' website sacrificed functionality for art. I concur.
Linked to in the orignal thread. Relevant quote: "Modern 'web 2.0' principles recommend a minimalist layout that helps the user find what he wants, rather than what the publisher wants the user to find. Nobody comes to a website to read advertising billboards."
The Paizo forum material I googled I can't find now, so I have no idea to which edition of the website they referred. But their gist was that Wizards' website sacrificed functionality for art. I concur.
The Paizo link you supplied was from a 2008 discussion. It's criticizing the layout that your first review was lauding as good design.
It's important to remember that, unlike other RPG companies, the D&D brand (and thus the D&D webpage) is not limited to the roleplaying game. The brand is expanded and includes videogames, boardgames, and other merchandising. So the initial page is unlikely to contain the links for how to play D&D, because "playing D&D" can mean multiple things now.
Also, I count only 24 links on the main page (38 if you include the links in dropdown menus):
From left to right and top to bottom:
The Banner at the top of the page, from left to right, these buttons are prominent but not dominating:
- The Wizards logo that takes you to wizards.com
- The Dungeons & Dragons logo which always takes you to the main page
- Daily D&D
- Games (this is a dropdown menu that can bring you to pages for roleplaying games, board games, and video games)
- Story (this link leads to the page for D&D Novels)
- Tools (this is a dropdown menu for each of the 6 DD Insider tools)
- Events (this is a dropdown menu for each of the 5 elements of organized play)
- Community (leads to the Community page and from there the forums)
- Playtest (leads to the Playtest)
- D&D Insider: Sign In/Sign out
The middle of the page: