Website Reviews 16 Apr

National Lottery
http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/

Searching for Reasons to be Cheerful, with a nod of appreciation to the late, great Ian Dury, I fix on the impressive technological innovation that goes into display monitors. Until quite recently moving to high display resolutions on large screen monitors was prohibitively expensive for most people. However the relentless march of technology has led to large screens for all except those on the most modest of budgets. Imagine having a monitor big enough to display a full browser session and a spreadsheet side by side. It's great if you have had to (and I have) laboriously transcribe data from the browser window into the spreadsheet. Tasks like this are easier with more screen real estate.

Viewing the National Lottery site recently, it struck me that the designers must have had large monitors and high resolutions in mind when they set about the task of refreshing this site. Laptop users, particularly those with the new ultra-portable ones, are poorly served by many sites and the National Lottery site is a prime example. There are some sites, newspaper sites, for instance where vertical scrolling goes with the territory, so an hour spent on guardian.co.uk or timesonline.co.uk is an hour spent scrolling. That's fine - if you want to read the content, you have to scroll. The amount you scroll is related to the size of your monitor / resolution combo. There are other sites, however, where vertical scrolling is not part of the expected usage of the site - sites that perform a function and require a visitor to move between many different screens in order to complete a transaction. In these cases, excessive scrolling is a great inconvenience and largely unnecessary.

The National Lottery refresh is attractive in a corporate-take-no-chances sort of way, however it is very wasteful of vertical space. This causes repeated vertical scrolling as you are going through a transaction. Try topping up an account on this site, then buy a ticket. Observe how far down the screen the action button consistently appears. Move from screen to screen and the action button appears below the fold. If you're viewing it on a laptop with a couple of toolbars in your browser, forget trying to see the action buttons.

Generally, any unnecessary step you force on a user risks disengagement and that's not smart. When every visitor is precious, it seems odd that a major brand would create an experience so negative for a large part of their base. Of particular annoyance is when a field appears below the fold next to an action button: complete the field (say, number of weeks you wish to play) and before you can say "stop scrolling" the screen has scrolled up and you need to scroll back down to find the action button. I mean, really. It's because of a recaclulation, but there are better ways to deal with this.

I know that I can F11 and zap the browser headers but I shouldn't need 900 pixels of screen depth to fit in a "next" button, for heavens sake. Some sites, e.g. Amazon put action buttons above and below the critical content in the checkout process. On a recent visit to the National Lottery site I had to vertically scroll on all bar two pages through my transaction. Yet, the top of the screen is largely wasted. For the top third of the visible screen, there is virtually no content. What a Waste, as Ian Dury wrote.