Analysis of Website – apple.com
www.apple.com - Assessment
The website I shoes is apple.com. It is for the company Apple Inc. which is a multinational American technology company. It sells consumers electronics, computers, software and services. I will assess the website on various parameters as follows:
Accessibility: I tried opening the website in four different browsers; internet explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Even though it works with all the browsers, the best experience is with Safari. The navigational buttons on the home page are well placed however the user has to click on each of them to see the subcategories. There is no drop down or visibility of subcategories based on mouse roll over. The content is separated from the navigational buttons which is good however the content is too dynamic and doesn’t let the user grasp everything unless clicked on a specific item.
Navigation: The labels are good mostly however the home icon represented by the apple icon is something I didn’t like. For a first time user, seeing an apple for home icon even on the home page is not something very suitable. It takes three clicks to go to the lowest level of details however once we are there, a lot of scrolling is required to read the content. I believe there should be more categorized content and rather than scrolling everything, a user should see what they want to see.
Design: The design is simple. Based on the kind of products the company manufactures and sells, only one theme has been adapted which is simplicity. If there were more themes added to the website like innovation, ease of use, being different, it would have been better. All these themes are not reflected on the web site. Navigation icons are well placed however design can be improved by reducing the amount of scroll the user needs to do for reading. It really gets tougher on hand held devices to read this much text and search what the user is looking for.
Layout: As mentioned above, the layout is tidy and simple. The navigation buttons and icons work well however the user has to click on each to see what is under it. The scrolling is a negative factor on the website in terms of layout and accessibility. Also, the layout is very static with a lot of images and text.
Functionality: There is no problem with functionality of the website. All the links work efficiently and it is easy to navigate. Only thing I could identify as an improvement is that when the user is on the third level of navigation, at the end of every page, there is a clickable icon to go back to previous navigation level or to home page however those icons are simple texts and even if the cursor is on that text it doesn’t change. There is no way to find out that those are clickable navigational buttons or icons.
As mentioned by Gilbertson (2010) in his article published on wired.co.uk, Apple’s website is based on HTML5 and the interesting thing is even though all the browsers will support this functionality, Apple somehow manages to showcase that this is only compatible with Safari and thus on every browser, Apple asks the user to download Safari. This is being done using Java classes within the code (Gilbertson, 2010).
Innovation and creativity is not just limited to products. Each and every section of a webste is important; even if it is a single word. As mentioned by Dormehl (2016), use of the tag “span” around any word which can seem offensive helped adding extra space between alphabets of the word “click” which demonstrates the perfectionism of Apple (Dormehl, 2016).
When I looked at the code, there are multiple good things however the simplicity and the commenting is what appealed me the most. The code is simple HTML and CSS together however each line is well documented with comments and error handling is amazing.
References
apple.com. (2016). Retrieved April 28, 2016 from http://www.apple.com/
Dormehl, L. (2016). Apple’s website becomes NSFW without this one line of code. Retrieved April 28, 2016, from http://www.cultofmac.com/414634/apples-website-becomes-nsfw-without-this-one-line-of-code/
Gilberston, S. (2010). Apple’s HTML5 showcase details power of (Apple) web code. Wired.co.uk. Retrieved April 2016 from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/7/apple%E2%80%99s-html5-showcase-details-power-of-%28apple%29-web-code
