David Little

I wanted to check out details of the Futurism and Richard Long exhibitions on the Tate website yesterday. On the Tate’s home page there is a rotating clickable “splash” image providing details of various exhibitions and events. Much to my annoyance the details of the Richard Long exhibition were quickly replaced by other information. There was no way to navigate back to it so I had to start exploring the site to find what I wanted. To be fair there is an “exhibitions” link as well as a navigable events calendar, but to locate what you want you need to do a fair amount of scrolling and there’s no obvious way of sorting events.

I would have preferred to have had some way of navigating through the information on the splash image — for instance, some carousel-style controls or something along the lines of the BBC home page:

On the BBC home page, there are clear controls to change the splash image — they even tell you what you’ll expect to see.

The problem with the Tate approach is that each image displays for about five seconds. I counted six images, so that’s thirty seconds you need to wait if you want to take another look at something that caught your eye. One sure way to frustrate your users.