Wanting to improve my site and getting a better feel of how others would experience it, I asked some people on my course for feedback on my final site. This is the feedback Stephin shared with me.
“The website has a good flow to it. Probably the best part of the whole site is the homepage and the way it animates when the user scrolls – with the name of the site going behind everything and the change in opacity. Makes it really immersive and looks like a lot of professional sites that do that same animation.
You’ve done a typical way of going about this project with the standard black background to convey that spacey feel with the art direction but that’s ok. The typeface/font choice is nice, really fits with the rest of the design of the website and the art direction as well. I also like the way that some of the letters are coloured red to make it stand out.
Some of the animations are good as well. I like how some animations plays when the user scrolls and the animation stops when the user stops scrolling, it’s little interactions like that make the site more engaging to use and interesting. What is also pretty cool is the animations of the astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and when you hover over them the faces animate.
The images are good because they follow the same colour scheme as the rest of the website. The way that red is the only colour on the site besides black and white is really effective in making the images stand out.
You haven’t included a footer though or a section with the references that the website uses. I would also make the padding the same throughout the website so that it’s consistent, like the spacing between all the sections because some sections have large spaces of black and some sections have short sections between them. And maybe making more micro animations or transitions as the user scrolls down with images fading in or growing would make the site look better.”
Receiving this feedback was great to hear and I was pleasantly surprised that my Apollo 11 site was received well. As designers, we can get too bogged down in the small details that we don’t see the bigger picture. So we need an outside perspective. As I was trying to perfect the different types of animations such as the Lotties and parallax animations, I didn’t realise that the padding between the site sections was all over the place. Making changes to this so that the site sections are consistent in size and spacing will make the experience a lot better and I’m glad Stephin commented on this.
I also didn’t realise about the missing footer – and that I had to reference my sources. The copy in my site is not my own work so making sure to indicate this somewhere in my site is important. This is another thing that I’ll have to add.