Vancouver 2010 on the web: the good, the bad, and the ugly

With the Winter Olympics underway I’ve been spending a lot of time on Vancouver 2010 website as well as those from some major Canadian media sources. Some have really impressed me with clean, grid-based design, strong features, and good usability. Others, not so much. Let’s take a look.

I will be looking at four major Canadian Olympics sites:

• The Official Vancouver 2010 site
• The CTV Olympics site (official broadcaster)
• The CBC Olympic site
• The Toronto Star Olympics site

For each site, I will look at the home page, the event schedule, and a sample sport page (Nordic Combined, since I always forget what that is), as well as a few other standout features or things I come across.All four sites feature similar basic layouts with grid-based design and horizontal navigation. They all feature news content, video and interactive features, sport and athlete profiles etc. Three of the four have chosen to use a large graphic background image.

The Good

The CBC Olympics website is my favourite of the four. I like the clean, bright layout. Their colour scheme ties in to both the Vancouver 2010 site (blue) and the team Canada colours (red). It’s a unique combination that really makes their site stand out. The ribbon motif in the background didn’t make much sense to me at first, but now that I look at it I can see the movement that is reminiscent of many winter sports (sledding, figure skating, downhill skiing).

Their home page has a similar layout to the others, and also includes lots of features, but unlike the competition they have done a good job of highlighting interesting features. There’s more differentiation between the different features which helps to lead your eye down the page and focus on their best features. They’ve also used some unobtrusive javascript to fit more content on the page and help you to navigate more conveniently.

Before the Games began they had a nice, simple schedule in table form (similar to the one on the official site). Now they’re showing a weird table with little squares for events and blue dots for medal events. Hello, confusing! Lesson: when displaying complex information, it’s usually best to keep it simple rather than attempting to come up with something clever that just doesn’t work.

On the individual sport pages, content can sometimes be lacking (which sort of makes sense since they aren’t an official broadcaster). The Nordic Combined page, for example, features a lot of content that isn’t specific to Nordic Combined at all. The menu for this individual section is further down the page and easy to miss, especially since it’s buried between unrelated content.

I’m having fun with a cool interactive feature showing the geographic distribution of medals over the years (and also by sport). It’s fun to see how things changed after the breakdown of the Soviet bloc. This is a great example of how to use Flash appropriately. Just do the interactive parts in Flash (what it’s good at, and HTML/CSS is currently not), while keeping the text content as HTML.

The Official Vancouver 2010 site is a close second for me so far. It’s more complex and some of the details haven’t been worked out as well as they could be. For example, they’ve taken care to fit the design into a 1024 window while adding interest at higher resolutions, but haven’t considered what happens to people who don’t maximize their windows, and therefore see a cut-off image on the right side. There’s a big hunk of white space in between the end of the content and the footer (every time I see that I want to get into the CSS and fix it!).

I also like what they did with the event schedule. Simple list of events by time, with an option to view by sport with a drop-down from the top. In previous years they usually had complicated tables with icons for which sport was happening on which day, and you had to click through to see which events were on at what time. This makes it much easier to see what’s happening (and print for reference).

The Nordic Combined page is similar to CBC’s, but with more content and an easier to find navigation menu. I enjoyed reading about the history of the sport. There’s even an interactive quiz to test your knowledge of the sport (love the Millionaire style cheats available!).

This site also has an interactive feature showing medal distribution over time. I like this one as well, although it feels a bit less responsive than CBC’s (this one is done in JavaFX, not Flash).

The Bad

The Toronto Star is sort of a third party to the Olympic Party – not an official broadcaster or local city paper. But of course, they have to get in on the party too, and  it’s not all that pretty. As usual with their sites, the Olympics site is complicated with small text and lots of (intrusive) ads. They have used the same colour scheme as the Official site, which shows a direct link to the main event.

Their schedule page is very simple, with just a list of events. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit harder to read and takes up a lot more space than the Official site’s schedule. They don’t seem to have a page for Nordic Combined, so I looked at the Cross Country page instead. The design isn’t much, and there’s not a lot of special features, but they do have very strong news coverage (appropriately enough!).

The Ugly

CTV is Canada’s official TV network for the Games (unfortunately outbid CBC for the next 2 Olympics.). Their site takes on a simlar form to the others – grid-based layout with lots of features on the home page. I find this one to be the most cluttered looking of the four. Their colour scheme doesn’t tie in to the Official 2010 colours, working with Canadian team colours instead.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find the graphic design to be very attractive. Their sharp, icy motif is a harsh contrast with the bright, clean look of the Official site and CBC’s. They use a lot of gradients and drab grey. Take a look, for example, at the centre section of their home page with the Results Spotlight, Latest Photos, and Medal Table. They use the same design scheme for their television graphics, where they aren’t any more successful.

Someone also made the (really bad) decision to create a separate domain rather than putting the Olympics site on a subdomain or folder on their main site. All that link juice down the toilet.

Their schedule is a grid with grey backgrounds to represent events occurring on that day and gold circles to show medal events. There are two dimensions of information that people might want to see on a schedule: What’s happening on that particular day, and when events are scheduled for a particular sport. This schedule attempts to show both, but doesn’t do either particularly well. The official site chose to optimize for events having day by day, while allowing users to click through to the event pages for the individual event schedules. Lesson: if you can’t accomplish all your goals in one interface, it’s sometimes better to optimize for one goal, while providing another interface for other objectives.

The Nordic Combined page, like the rest of their site, is very complicated and graphically heavy. A lot of the content isn’t directly related to Nordic Combined, but there’s no graphical differentiation to tell you what belongs and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a block is related to the page topic or not.

Other examples?

Have you seen other examples of Olympic websites that you’d like to share? What are the media outlets in your country doing?

There is a lot more I could say about the four I’ve chosen to profile here, but I only have so much time to type these days with a four month old at home!

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