Museum of Bad Design - VA Beach Site

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Virginia Beach Header

12 February 2007 - One of our readers, Hilyard Decker, has suggested that the City of Virginia Beach’s website is a good candidate for our Museum of Bad Design. Says Hilyard:

Try to find the jobs postings. Even if you know what you’re doing, it takes five clicks.

And he’s right. To look at the jobs available you have to run quite a gauntlet:

  1. On the homepage click CAREERS (and then select Human Resources dropdown option) … no mention of JOBS
  2. Now you’re at the Human Resources homepage. You have to scan lots of options to find another CAREERS link: CAREER OPPORTUNITIES … which is right next to CAREER INFORMATION … again, where are the JOBS?
  3. At the CAREER OPPORTUNITIES page we are told all about a new program, WAVE, that lets you set up an account and submit job applications online. Sounds rather involved, given that I haven’t been shown a single job listing that I might be interested in. After forcing visitors to think about this program, the site offers a glimpse of daylight: “Click here to access our career site and to submit a City of Virginia Beach application.” This is the point at which smoke starts to come out of my ears: after three clicks and lots of irrelevant reading, I’m still not AT your “career site?” And why presume I want to submit an application, since I haven’t seen job one?
  4. Okay. Click again. Now we’re at the WAVE homepage. That stands for Web Application for Virginia (beach) Employment. Pretty lame acronym. But still no jobs. Plenty of confusing options though. And a suggestion: “To search positions, click the SEARCH POSTINGS link at left.” Hm. Do I smell jobs nearby?
  5. The SEARCH POSTINGS page confronts us with a search engine with four drop-down variables: Job Type, Posting Type, Job Title, and Department. Whew! By now feel like I’m already on the payroll! These search criteria are not all that helpful: why would I really care about all these variables if I’m just browsing? And the “Job Title” dropdown contains dozens and dozens of titles. I guess if you’re looking for ONE specific job opening in ONE department it might be helpful. But PLEASE, just let me look over your open positions!
  6. Luckily, there is a hint here: “You may view all open postings by not specifying any search criteria and clicking on the Search button.” It’s counter-intuitive though, requiring us to use their Search Tool, but not to search. To view all. Hm. How about a VIEW ALL JOBS button? And how about putting it 5 clicks back, on the City Homepage?

Virginia Beach’s bad user design is not attypical. This kind of painful process is usually a sign that the site was designed by its programmers, who may be so proud of their gizmos (like the search engine) that they force people to use them. In this case it looks like there’s also undue influence of the bureaucrat or department that came up with this WAVE thing, and mandated that it be an unavoidable roadblock.

Congratulations Virginia Beach, for being our Bad Design of the Week!

A few good stories today related to user design: a piece on the increased priority of good user design, The human factor in gadget, Web design on C-Net… and a Macworld editor’s rant, On meaningless hyperlink graphics about the new link pop-ups appearing these days that serve no purpose other than to drive us crazy.

Again, if there’s a poorly designed or ugly product, web site, software or anything else that is working your last nerve, tell me about it! Leave a comment or drop a line to: museum(at)mjvilardi(dot)com.

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