4Ocean
What is the interactive about?
4Ocean is an informational environmental website, which is the only global ocean cleanup operation that is stopping plastic pollution at the source. It is an informational website where it discusses the cleanups they run around the world.
Who is it designed for?
The recommended user that it can be designed for is someone who is at a mature age veering around the late 20s to late 50s who has an interest in preserving the environment and marine life as well as people who watch their plastic use at home.
What knowledge does it assume the target audience?
- Laid back formality
- Easy to read (blue text on white)
- Bold text at times
- Anyone can navigate the page easily.
- Simple navigation on phone.
- Not cluttered, easy to read.
- Used space effectively
- There isn’t much information so it seems that anyone should be able to navigate easily through and understand whats happening
Describe the type of user interactions, and the user interface.
- No indicator for page and the inconsistency of pages isn’t helping
- Standard html layout
- Shop section- change into grid format to view more products at a time. (On phone, products take up entire screen)
- Help button on bottom right corner on phone and page
- Map on cleanups page- Hard to understand purpose except for statement at the bottom, kinda been slapped in the middle or the page.
- Not really eye catching
- Black footer seems out of place. Also another menu.
What can you say about the visual design – layout, colour, and typography? How would you describe the style?
Layout:
The website incorporates and combines a varying range of simple yet effective layout designs, a full screen gif on the homepage and a modern yet simple layout of two columns in a row to display text and images, most other pages use grids as well as headline and thumbnails gallery layouts to display products, team members and other images.
Colour:
The website uses a monochromatic colour palette that consists of mostly cool tones of shades of blue, the primary colour which is used to represent the concept and ideas the website is conveying, blue relates to oceans, etc.
Typography:
The website uses sans serif font that is visually professional and formal and aids the equally professional and formal language used. They incorporate bold and light styled text to use as headings, sub-titles and to highlight important phrases and words. It uses a combination of the fonts; Helvetica, Arial and Monsterrat.
What improvements would you suggest?
While the website works fine in terms of functionality it could use changes to get users more invested in the issue the website is trying to promote. It comes off as a little bland and boring only implementing a generic blue monochromatic colour palette and generic modern layout. There is no consistency within the layouts of each page, they all vary and as a result can cause for unnecessary confusion for users. This could be solved by incorporating the same/similar layout for most pages allowing the user more familiarity and control.
Lack of information:
There feels to be a lack of information on the website regarding the issue they are trying to raise awareness of, could be fixed by adding more information.
Link to the website:
Joel's Development Design Experience 