Yale’s Art Department Site: Worst Site Ever?

by Paul Sherman on November 9, 2010 · 14 comments

in Bring The Funny, Design

Yale University’s Art Department site might just be the worst site ever created in the history of the Internet, Bitnet, Arpanet, BBS systems, Geocities, AOL, Compuserve, etc. Check it: http://art.yale.edu/

Please don’t blame me if you go blind, insane, or fly into a design-induced rage. I’m just the bearer of awful design news.

As I tweeted, it gets bonus points for having a nice big picture of Hitler front and center. Because, you know, there’s nothing more you can do to terrible design, except maybe to stick a picture of Hitler on it.

  • http://hilker.tumblr.com hilker

    even the back end is designed poorly: “Internal Server Error”

    • Test

      just to see what happens

  • http://maryspecht.com/ Mary Specht

    Did we crash their site?

    • http://www.usabilityblog.com/ pjsherman

      I think that was reddit’s doing. I originally found it on their site.

  • http://icorbin.com Brandon Corbin

    My favorite parts are the background images – reminds me of Myspace from back in the day.

  • Dave

    I could try to throw around some “expert review” style usability failures of the site, but I honestly didn’t have any real-world usability problems. I found the “About the Site” page (which explains why the site doesn’t look like just another WordPress template) and read it just fine…but apparently you and others didn’t, so I suppose that’s a failure in some way.

    • Dave_MN

      So, if I explain why my site is designed like someone vomited code on a page, then it’s okay?  I’ll keep that in mind.  There does come a point where bad aesthetic design affects “real world usability”.  As in, “I don’t want to use this because it’s aggressively attacking me visually in a way that is unhelpful”.  I didn’t want to go to the “About the Site” page, because I didn’t have much hope that the content would be any good based on the horrid entry to the site.  That’s a failure in something other than the “I can’t find it” sense, it’s a failure in the “I don’t want to put up with it” sense.

  • http://www.usabilityextra.com Peter Inyang

    Definitely not much improved even with the new background. Usability faux pas (especially with the contact details at top of the page)

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  • http://www.losebellyfat.org.uk Jon

    OMG. I saw your headline and was expecting something that was failing generally on usability, I was not expecting to see that maelstrom of disaster. What are they thinking? I guess it is the Art section….

  • Jim Portner

    The best part about this is that on the “Course” on the left they offer several in “Graphic Design”. “Learn from the Pros!”

  • http://twitter.com/dland Dave Land

    If you think the home page is bad, try logging in. You get some sort of animated GIF background with flashing arrows to indicate that you’re lost. It’s just … sad.

  • Trish Flynn94

    I am using this as an example in web design as the worst ever. 

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