KXAN News

kxan.com

Intended audience

News viewers in Austin and central Texas.

Usefulness of content

• The most useful news items, top stories, weather and traffic, are featured prominently on the main page. However, the entertainment section is given equal prominence on the far right hand side of the page and is even highlighted in green. This is puzzling.
  
• Today, a red flag warning for various counties scrolls across the top of the page, which is very useful content, justifying the use of motion on the page.
  
• At least a third of the page is devoted to ads, which is too many ads. What's worse, there are ads which look like actual content ("Austin Gas Prices"). I know that they have to make a few bucks off of the site, but that's bordering on unscrupulous as they are tricking viewers into clicking on the links.
  
• I have mixed feelings about the video footage featured on the site. This seems to be very popular with news sites nowadays, but my experience has been that people surf news sites while at work, and you don't want your coworkers or boss to catch you watching a video on your computer at work. So, I tend to avoid the video footage unless it's something that you really have to see, which the majority of news does not fall into. Also, there's a bigger time investment with watching videos, as opposed to text that you can skim.
  
• Further down the page, there is too much content (both headlines and ads) to discern what is useful.

Consistency of design

• The strangest thing here is the CW entertainment tab and bar in green on the right hand side of the page, which feels tacked on and out of place. You can't help but feel that its raison d'etre is to generate ad revenue.
  
• Other than that, the pages have a consistent blue and blue-white color scheme, which is somewhat plain.
  
• The top navigation bar is consistent throughout the site pages.
  
• The site aspect which most hurts consistency is the ads. They are woven into the pages, perhaps to combat banner blindness, but their sizes, color schemes, and content vary wildly, and this cripples any attempt at good design.

Ease of navigation

• The pages take an eternity to load, so you click on a link, and wait...
  
• The pages continuously refresh themselves, which, combined with the previous bullet, is beyond annoying. And the absolute worst scenario is when you are trying to navigate somewhere but the page is busy refreshing. Argh.
  
• On the brighter side, the navigation bar across the top with pop-up menus provides easy access to most important areas of the site.
  
• The kxan.com logo in the upper left hand side of the page should also serve as a link back to the home page, but it's not.
  
• The search box is somewhat hidden because it's small and plain. However, it is in the default location, the upper right hand corner, so it's easy to find, and a search for "allergies" gives good results.