Versus: Soompi’s Site Design Avoids Disaster But Has Significant Problems

Ah, Soompi. This brings back nostalgic memories of trolling their forums for shits and giggles during my younger days.

But that’s a story for another time.

Today, I am here to critique Soompi’s layout.

To keep things fair and in line with the Versus topic, I am using the same guidelines as I did for my critique of allkpop‘s layout.

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1. Visual Flow

Like allkpop, Soompi screwed the pooch here.

As I said in my previous article, it is important for news websites to facilitate good visual/reading flow for its users. This will help the users consume articles more efficiently, thus creating a more pleasant user experience.

Going back to a previous example, Google News does a great job at this. News articles are laid out so that newer articles are placed on top of the older ones. With this kind of layout, the users can then quickly scan the article from top to bottom and look for things that are relevant to their interests.

See the picture below:

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Now, let’s look at Soompi:

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There is no rhyme or rhythm to how Soompi places its articles, and there are no visual cues to guide my eyes across its website. As a result, my eyes are looking all over the page trying to find naked pi…uh…articles to stimulate my intellectual senses.

Honestly, it’s almost worse than allkpop’s old design*.

*Since I wrote that article about allkpop’s layout, it has since changed moderately for the better, getting rid of that awful fucking grid at least.

To begin, I am scanning across the article categories on top, trying to figure out why Music articles are placed in front of Television articles, but I gave up shortly after because I can’t make sense of which articles would be placed where or why they are ordered the way they are. Are the Featured articles also in the Music and Television tabs or are they only in Featured? Why do I even have to ask this fucking question of myself?

Next, my eyes are darting around in a schizo-like manner because I can’t find any visual cues to help guide my eyes across the site. I don’t know if I should read from left to right or top to bottom or vice versa. You can assume what’s supposed to happen, but users aren’t supposed to be left to assume, they are supposed to be given direction.

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All of this adds up to a painful user experience, and this is coming from a guy who’s fairly experienced with scouring the internet for scantily clad women. Now imagine a technophobe trying to read Soompi…good luck with that.

Shit is worse than a virgin trying to find the right hole.

2. Visual Design

Visually, I don’t find anything wrong with most of Soompi’s elements, as it closely follows the conventions established by other news websites.

Each article starts off with a picture that attracts our attention to the article itself, and then the article title and a short excerpt are placed below the picture, which provides a natural reading flow for the users.

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While that may sound similar to allkpop’s old format, the difference is that allkpop’s articles were in a grid and there was only a picture and a title. The description and all the other information didn’t become clear until you moused over the article square itself, so the visual cues weren’t anywhere near as easy to follow.

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If I had to nitpick, there are two main things that I don’t like.

Like allkpop, there are too many elements on the page trying to grab my attention. This makes the website difficult to navigate and makes users unable to decide what to do or find what they need.

This is akin to the paradox of choice. People desire more choices, yet are paralyzed and unable to choose when the selection is greater. Or in layman’s terms – this is bad for the user experience.

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Additionally, I think Soompi’s navigation bars can be better designed. The top bar represents the the different sectors of Soompi, and the bottom bar represents the subsections of the currently selected sector. However, these two navigation bars are placed independently of each other, which makes users feel like the navigation bars are unrelated to each other.

To improve this, they can apply Gestalt’s principle of proximity. They should bring the related navigation bars together, as it will make it clearer that the top navigation bar is related to the bottom navigation bar.

3. Site Speed

Alexa has the load time at 3.84 seconds with 93% of sites faster and Pingdom (my favorite load time tool) generally clocks Soompi at slower than 76% of sites at between 5-7 seconds. On my own personal connection, it took around 8 seconds to fully load.

It’s faster than allkpop, but that’s like beating a guy with no legs in a 100 meter dash.

The clear advantage Soompi has is that I can click on their articles or read the article descriptions without having to wait for it to load completely like the old allkpop layout, so at least they did that right.

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Conclusion

There are pros and cons to Soompi’s layout and overall design. They did some things well and some other things…not so well.

Overall, Soompi is visually bland, as it looks like every other amateur news/blogging site out there. You see them but you don’t remember them. This is unfortunate because we human beings tend to perceive beautiful things as easier to use (also known as the aesthetic usability effect). Without a beautiful design, users will perceive Soompi’s usability to be even worse than it is technically.

Also, as a website, Soompi lacks a voice. For example, when you visit Asian Junkie, IAFTB‘s foul mouth and provocative thoughts make you feel like you are talking to an angry brute who’s not afraid to speak his mind. In addition, the pervy comments following the articles make you feel like you’re stuck in some hentai tentacle porn convention.

IATFB’s Note: Die in a fire.

All of this leads to a lack of personality, which further hampers Soompi’s perceived usability because people like to find human-like qualities in objects and things (also known as anthropomorphism). When we do, we find those objects or things (or in our case, websites) to be more attractive and usable because we establish emotional connections to them.

Ever wonder why the coke bottle is designed to mimic the female form? That’s why.

I don’t know if you understood even half of what I just rambled about, so let me put this in a way that people can understand. On a scale of YoonA (solid) to Hyoyeon (disgusting), Soompi is somewhere akin to Sunny.