http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

But i was wearing the ‘criticise-em-all’ cap which means i’ll just criticise everything that catches the eye

Regarding answers to your questions:

1. Yes, but before the questions are answered I go “design is definitely not the strength of this company, shouldn’t they hire a freelance graphic designer … ah nevermind, lemme read on…”

2. (continued from previous thoughts…)…”Oh cool, they have some award winning products… lemme read on…”

3. I am not so sure what you mean

Regarding web 2.0.. I guess O’Reilly knows about it.. and yeah it’s quite subjective

Just a note – my job is to do consulting on marketing, branding, media, product strategy etc.

The things you’re talking about dont affect experience or branding, especially #4. #4 actually extends the brand – think the many different google logos. Finally, brand isnt a logo anyway (I can see you haven’t been reading G&W for long enough)

10% of the experience or less may be due to visual design, but these things certainly dont warrant “quite a few problems” that make things “very amateur”.

Ask yourself these three questions with the site:
1- Are 8 of the 10 first questions about CDF answered within 5 seconds of visiting the front page?
2- Will they continue to be answered if the products went from 3 to 50 ; awards from 3 to 50, etc (i.e. does the experience scale)
3- What is the ROI of the user and the company based on?

Oh and web2.0 isnt about the things you mentioned either (from a ROI perspective) but lets not get into that debate, even silicon valley hasn’t settled on it

1. On your home page, and others there is a grey border around the website. The same theme is not followed on career’s page.

2. Green&white logo looks ‘squeezed’. Also this is different from actual green&white logo, so for sake of developing a brand; it should be consistent everywhere.

3. Other than the “Snip” logo, rest of the logos look “un-neat”. I know this sounds subjective but then designs are subjective.

4. Logo theme changes on Careers page. Again not good for branding.

5. When you click on an opening, there should be a waiting logo; it’s the basic thing as the user wouldn’t know what’s going on – especially if he’s on a GRPS connection or a dial-up, like myself

Although, all these things are very minor; together they make a website look very amateur.

Faisal, web 2.0 is not about “undesign”; it’s about fast, loading, standards compliant websites particularly with stress on user generated content. Regarding design take a look at numerous “web 2.0″ sites, and you will see the difference between a good design and a bad design is consistency of spacing, colors, fonts, font sizes, and the use of real-estate on a web page. By the way, there are quite a few local websites that have pretty good “web 2.0″ish websites.

By the way, I am neither a programmer, nor a designer – my job is to sell my company’s products and services

You sound like the type of person we like to hire – is this criticism a job application? :p

I’m curious to know in detail what you think is wrong with the usability, and how you could make it even easier to use. Email me.

No buzzwords please, like “consistency in terms of the visual grid” and “delivering the degree of branding” because, you know, it could be that you’re defining those things completely differently compared to another person.

Same thing with usability and visual aethetics actually, so email me describing what you mean.

Liek most companies, we’d like our excellent team to work on our core products and things that will help propel the company forward – our website isn’t (yet) a way of winning more business, but once it becomes that I’m sure we’ll be asking the team to focus on it.

The design is done wonderfully well in the web 2.0 domain.

“Undesign” is the design implementation in today’s world.

And yet, considerable passions and good
intentions aside, as far as the cdfsoftware
website is concerned, it is mediocre in its design ie in terms of both usability and visual aesthetics. I’m only guessing here but it seems to be the outcome of a collaboration between a web developer and perhaps a graphics designer instead of an experienced web designer. There is no consistency in terms of the visual grid and the javascript does not degrade gracefully.

I don’t mean to go into a design critique here. Its just that with claims of having one of the best teams in terms of customer experience design in the country, inconsistency in delivering the same degree of user experience and branding on your website was disappointing.