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Sassy Fox Website Analysis

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Design
Even if a website has good information architecture and content, poor design can take away from the two elements and negatively affect the usability of the site. According to Johnson, successful web design is minimalistic and easily readable with font choices and color palettes (39). The design of Sassy Fox’s website is either extremely busy and misleads users or is minimalistic to a fault. Examples of these extremes are the website’s header and user forms.
One very distracting element of the Sassy Fox website is the header image that takes up half of the screen. In chapter six, Johnson addresses busy backgrounds saying, “visual noise in and around text can disrupt recognition of features, characters, and words, and therefore drop reading …show more content…

In chapter seven, Johnson discusses the Gestalt principle of proximity stating that, “…the relative distance between objects in a display affects our perception of whether and how the objects are organized into subgroups” (13). He explains further that the closer one object is to another, the easier it is to decipher them as grouped/related (14). To purchase a gift certificate on the Sassy Fox site, the user has to fill out a form with recipient and personal information. The content of the form is standard, but the proximity between the required information and their related text boxes makes the layout hard to understand. Of the six fields, only two of the boxes are located directly to the right of the text. And as the user progresses further, the boxes are one space above where they should be (Figure …show more content…

Users are pulled to areas that are graphic heavy, but have no purpose. While features like the gift certificate form are unusable because they are so underdeveloped. In my opinion, the website would benefit from changing the Sassy Fox logo to plain text, removing all background images, and using fonts that are visible and have good contrast. The forms are better left simple, but the field box definitely need to be closer to its correlating text.
Conclusion:
In this analysis, I only covered a few out of the many problems that that hurt the usability of Sassy Fox’s website. If I had to give it a grade, it would be the lowest one possible because overall the website is incomplete. Navigating the website is a grid that leads to nowhere, there is no real content, and the design choices are visually overwhelming. Sassyfox.com is absolutely not a functional webstore by any means and should definitely be unpublished. I honestly wonder if making it public was a mistake. There are no good things about this

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