Pratt Institute Cannoneers is the official athletics website of Pratt Institute, primarily providing information about school teams, including game schedules, highlights, and team rosters. This article critiques will focus on the homepage of the website using terms and concepts from Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things.
The homepage consists of three main sections: a navigation bar, an archives section featuring school team news, and a banner area that includes links to Shop Pratt Athletics (merchandise) and social media.
Navigation bar
The navigation bar provides an overview of the website’s structure, organizing content into categories such as Sports, Recreation, Inside Athletics, Recruits, Fans, and Shop. It demonstrates clear discoverability, allowing users to easily navigate different sections. Additionally, it effectively applies signifiers to indicate interactive elements. For example, in the “Sports” dropdown menu, when hovering over “Volleyball,” multiple signifiers are present: a subtle background color change, contrasting text color, an added underline, and a cursor change (see Fig. 1).
Archives
The Archives section exhibits several issues related to design principles. First, while the central “Archive” text is clickable, it only provides a cursor change, which makes it less obvious that the text is interactive. Additionally, users cannot know whether the archive contains text-based articles, photo highlights, or videos before clicking. This issue relates to unclear affordance—users are unsure what kind of content they can expect.
Furthermore, the feedback from the “Archive” link does not lead to a full archive of all news but instead filters news based on the specific sport mentioned in the article, this discrepancy might points to a Gulf of Execution, the user’s intention of finding all archived news does not align with the actual outcome. Lastly, when trying to view a news article, users must click directly on the headline rather than anywhere within the image block, this might cause slips where users mistakenly assume the entire image is interactive. Moreover, the headline text does not change color when hovered over, making it harder to recognize as a clickable element.
Therefore, the following adjustments are recommended: (1) Rename “Archive” to “Archive of the Team” and add an underline or color change as hover effects to improve signifiers, which align with users’ expectations and be more intuitive. (2) Add hover effects to the headline, and format it like a column section with a brief excerpt and a “Read More/ Learn More“ label (See Fig. 3). This strengthens signifier by making the headline more obviously clickable, and supports a clearer conceptual model of how information is displayed, helping users understand how to navigate news articles more easily.
Banners: Shop Pratt Athletics and Social Media
The Shop Pratt Athletics banner and Social Media links exhibit issues with discoverability. Displayed in Fig. 4, while users can access the merchandise site by clicking on the “Shop” button in the navigation bar, two other clickable banners further down the page do not clearly communicate their purpose. On the other side, the Social Media section uses large blank spaces that contribute to the ambiguity about affordance, there is no immediate feedback to indicate any interaction. Users only realize they must click on small floating icons (Fig. 5) beside the banners, which might violate their cognitive model of interaction.
Therefore, the following adjustments are recommended: (1) Merge the two separate banners into one more cohesive sectionm this might improve discoverability and reduce cognitive load. (2) Remove the large social media banner since it is not a formal section; keeping the small floating icons would be sufficient and more intuitive.
Overall, the homepage of Cannoneers offers comprehensive information about the athletics teams and events. However, areas for improvement include enhancing the signifiers for clearer interaction cues and making the presentation of external links more intuitive.