I wanted to see what homework I needed to do for my HCI class, so I went to the course website. I knew that all the information I needed would be included on the Schedule page, so I naturally clicked on “Schedule” at the bottom of the home page:
I expected to be taken to the Schedule page, but instead I arrived at the Assignments page:
I was momentarily confused. Had I clicked on the wrong link? I saw another “Schedule” link in the middle of the page, so I clicked on that instead. At last, I arrived at the Schedule page.
My assignments due Tuesday were all nicely listed, including a link to the “Individual Good Design / Bad Design Assignment”:
However, clicking this link again brought me back to the Assignments page. I felt like I was going crazy. Luckily, this page did have a working link to the assignment I was looking for:
Clearly, these links were not working as intended. They were nicely labelled with names of existing pages on the website, so a user would expect them to lead to the pages with those names. If this had been the case (as was intended), there would have been nothing notable about my search for my homework assignments, and I probably would not have consciously noticed anything about the design of these pages. Instead, because the functionality was different than what the signifiers (the names of the links) suggested, I was confused and annoyed.
All images are screenshots from https://sites.google.com/williams.edu/csci376-2018/.