CSC : Confusing new arrivals

Typographical treatment of a company description clouds a home page feature.

The Site

CSC, a worldwide IT services provider, devotes a large panel on its home page to a ‘mission statement’ in a way that may confuse regular web users.

The panel sits beneath and is about a third of the depth of a tabbed and captioned interactive picture panel that occupies the main content area of the global home page. Within the panel runs the statement ‘We help clients achieve their strategic goals and profit from the use of information technology’. The text runs over three lines that are aligned raggedly and variably spaced, while several words are picked out in different type sizes: ‘achieve, and ‘profit’ are larger than ‘information technology’, which is bigger than ‘strategic goals’. None of these words is actively linked to content. However, the three words in all-capitals in a subsidiary line at the bottom of the panel – Consulting, Systems integration and Outsourcing – do lead to pages within the site.

The Takeaway

CSC attempts what a surprising number of large organisations do not, which is to give visitors new to the site or the company a short, comprehensible idea of what it does. Unfortunately, the way it chooses to present the message is likely to frustrate some visitors or lead them to conclude that CSC’s own information technology is malfunctioning.

The nub of the problem is the prominence and typographical treatment of the words in the statement panel. The combination of apparently random alignment and variable type size to highlight key words mimics the look of a ‘tag cloud’, the cluster of ‘most read’ or ‘most searched’ topics that is spreading as a way of providing quick, user-driven links from a home page. Visitors familiar with tag clouds are more than likely to click on CSC’s highlighted words in the expectation of them leading somewhere, only to be frustrated or disappointed (and more likely to miss the active links at the bottom of the panel). Either CSC has gone for a cheap ‘trendy’ effect – in which case style has again triumphed over practicality – or it hasn’t yet got its head in the tag clouds. Whichever is the case, it needs to revisit its thinking.

First published on 10 July, 2007