ITV falls behind other major broadcasters in World Cup website usability
- Added:
- Jun 28, 2010
FIFA offers football fans the most usable World Cup news and video content website, while the ITV World Cup website falls well behind other major broadcasters; the BBC, Sky and Eurosport, in usability, despite the broadcaster showing a substantial amount of tournament matches both on TV and online.
The ‘World Cup Websites: All to Play For’ report from user experience consultancy, Webcredible, revealed that FIFA’s World Cup website is leading in the usability stakes with a score of 74 per cent, with the BBC, Sky Sports and Eurosport coming in a close joint second with 72 per cent.
ITV’s World Cup website on the other hand lagged well behind the other sites in the study in 5th place with a usability score of 52 per cent, possibly leading to users dropping off and visiting other websites to get their World Cup news and content.
The ‘World Cup Websites: All to Play For’ report analysed the World Cup-focused websites of FIFA and four major broadcasters - the BBC, Sky, ITV and Eurosport, against 10 best practice usability guidelines. The guidelines focused on homepage priorities, supporting key user tasks, user engagement, and navigation and orientation.
Despite the close scores at the top, the sites reviewed performed differently across the range of guidelines. The FIFA site performed well on all guidelines except finding and watching video content. The BBC site excelled at linking its content together to provide an integrated experience.
The Eurosport site didn’t excel in any particular area, except providing a clear route to World Cup content from its homepage, but performed consistently above average in all other guidelines. The Sky Sports site performed particularly well in the delivery of key information (results, fixtures, group stages, and teams) and provided the most engaging experience for users.
The ITV site lagged behind the other sites because it performed poorly on some key user tasks (including delivery of news and group stage information). It also scored badly on some basic usability guidelines relating to navigation and the presentation of key tasks on the homepage. Not good news for the broadcaster following recent reports of problems with online streaming for many users during the opening World Cup match.
Trenton Moss, Director at Webcredible comments, “Despite the overall high scores, it’s surprising that the sites reviewed didn’t perform better because the information generated by the World Cup is pre-structured and well understood. The 2010 World Cup is seeing people going online en masse like no other World Cup before it, not just for information and scores but also to stream matches. This coupled with increasing access on mobile devices means that with the choice of content available, users will not hang around on a site that they find difficult to use, but will head for a competitor.”
Results
The 5 World Cup websites received the following scores in total, out of 100:
|
Organisation |
Website |
Total score |
|
FIFA |
74 |
|
|
Sky Sports |
72 |
|
|
Eurosport |
72 |
|
|
BBC |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2010/default.stm |
72 |
|
ITV |
52 |
|
|
Average score |
|
68.4 |
Methodology
Webcredible analysed the 5 World Cup websites in June 2010.
Each website was evaluated against 10 best practice guidelines and assigned a score of 0-5 for each guideline, with 5 being the maximum. With 10 guidelines in total, websites were assigned a total Web Usability Index rating out of 50 which was then turned into a percentage. A full copy of the report can be downloaded from http://www.webcredible.co.uk/worldcup.
Source: www.webcredible.co.uk
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