Review 3: Comparing Food Chain Websites
Brian, Milt, and I are creating a restaurant site so I took a look at the websites for Wendy’s and and In-N-Out Burger because Wendy’s my favorite fast food joint in Pittsburgh and In-N-Out is supposedly the best on the West Coast which is where I’m moving in a couple months.
Wendy’s home page is balanced well; background image of food with info centered in the middle. I have a real problem with its tabs though. A couple are links to other pages and a couple open completely new tabs with the pages and I think that’s a lack of Unity. Either they should all open new tabs or they should all stay in the same tab. This ties in to Krug’s 4th “Thing” about knowing what constitutes a link. Because all of the labels look the same but perform different actions, I’m not sure if I click on anything else if I will open a new tab or not, which I don’t want to because it is inconvenient
The site’s areas are pretty well defined as per Thing 3, and the visual hierarchy is there, usually placing food first in the center then having advertising on the sides or bottom, so I would say emphasis is acceptable. I’m iffy about the layout though. There are a lot of links in the center of the frame, but you still have to scroll down to see menu items and other important info. I guess I would say the layout idea is good, but what they put in each area of the layout is not.
They did manage to minimize noise on most pages, opting for a simple plain color background instead of trying to shove images of food in your face.
I like In-N-Out Burger’s Layout from the start. Nearly everything is in the browser and you don’t have to scroll to find anything, all links are presented in the space provided. This really makes me feel good about the accessibility as opposed to Wendy’s where I’m scrolling around looking for certain things. Also to note, INO doesn’t open new tabs when you click on links which helps the uniformity of the site, making it easier to navigate.
I don’t know why I like this but INO has a separate scroll bar in the center of the frame so if they have a lot of info, you can scroll down what they have without scrolling down the actual web page. I guess it’s easier to keep track of where I am and what I’m looking at because even though I am scrolling info, most of the web page is staying the same so I’m more focused on what I’m seeing. The layout of their site is much stronger than Wendy’s.
INO also has much less noise. I didn’t think Wendy’s site had much until I saw how little INO has; they show their products, foundations, and info etc but advertising is kept to a minimum freeing up space. Wendy’s has little links to sign up for gift cards, or the Veteran’s Advantage Program and now that I look back at it, there is too much info on their site that could be organized better.
The visual hierarchy of INO is very easy to grasp because whatever you need to see, you click it and it goes to the center. For example, with their burgers, they have listed so that whichever burger you put the cursor on appears in front and you can rotate them around in a circle like a carousel to see each. I’d equate it to choosing a video game character or a car in a racing game. INO’s History page is neat because it’s a scrolling page like our Folklore project so that you can scroll through the company history in a box in the center of the frame, while the edges remain constant so you can read all of that while you are still technically on the same web window width which, again, is something I enjoy.
Overall, INO is a much cleaner site than Wendy’s. Their Organization is better, as is their Layout, Balance, and Unity. Wendy’s also has much more noise and its too-large web pages make navigation undesirable. I can safely say I would be more inclined to eat at INO Burger than Wendy’s just after comparing websites.