CFDT : Working on looks

Unconventional visuals go against ease of use.

The Site

CFDT, one of France’s major trade union groupings, lets design overwhelm usability.

CFDT, Confédération française démocratique du travail, has a site designed to provide information and contact points, and to persuade people to join. The home page is made up of a patchwork of panels of various size, using strong pastel colours – they include (in French) Get to know us, Helping you, Join us, Focus on and Find us.

Eight of the panels are repeated at the top of the inside pages, apparently as primary section links. The panels here are still substantial, and have generous space between them, so take up three lines. Clicking most of them leads to the relevant section. There is also left-hand navigation, though this repeats four of the eight top links. Secondary linking is found by rolling the cursor over these.

The Takeaway

Anyone familiar with French websites will not be surprised to find yet another in strong pastel colours. While it is a little odd that a union site should look so similar to a raft of corporates (try danone.fr or bouygues.fr), the real problem here is that the visual designers have been able to ride roughshod over usability. The patchwork home page is only slightly confusing, but inside pages are very tricky. The triple-decker ‘navigation bar’ at the top takes up far too much space: together with other bits of visual furniture, it pushes the starting point of text halfway or more down a standard screen.

Worse, the site both wastes space and ignores convention by using the left-hand menu not for providing secondary links but to repeat some of the top links. The answer must be to cut the top set, which is pretty much redundant. Trouble is it looks pretty, so that seems unlikely to happen. Good sites sort their navigation out before the graphics people get anywhere near them; that has clearly not happened here.

First published on 24 September, 2009