designmuseum.org : A case of Design before Usability ?

Saul Bass Exhibition at the Design Museum

One of the great graphic designers of the 20th century, Saul Bass is the undisputed master of film title design. The haunting elegance of the titles he created for Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick in the 1950s and 1960s and, later, for Martin Scorsese transformed a banal medium into an art form. Before Bass, titles were simple lists of the cast and crew projected on to cinema curtains which were only drawn when the film began. As this landmark exhibition will show, Saul Bass turned the film title into a visual spectacle. From his stark cut-out's for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, and the spiralling circles of Hitchcock's Vertigo, to the frenzied neons of Scorsese's Casino, Saul Bass created some of the most enduring images in design and cinema history.
The Design Museum from 17 July 2004

designmuseum.org : A case of Design before Usability?

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen said that during the second half of the 1990s usability took second place to design and that bad design played a part in the collapse of dotcom companies because customers would not use difficult websites.

I was trying to get some details about the Saul Bass exhibition from the designmuseum.org site and I found it very very difficult. I was trying to use my arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate the flash version and when I switched to the HTML (reduced content) version I found it to be unusable if you have popups blocked.

I got worried when I saw the instruction "Rollover to reveal navigation".

They claim that they are "the world's most popular design site" with over 500,000 virtual visitors a year. They are happy to publicise the number of visitors to their site, but can they tell us how many users manage to find the location map that they are looking for*?

The self proclaimed mission of the British Design Museum is to "excite everyone about design" and act as "a champoin of design".

If this is the best that the British Design Museum can produce then god help British Design.

*Solution to task

From designmuseum.org Enter Flash Version.
Hover over "About the Design Museum" and you should see the word "visiting" flash by.
Click on "About the Design Museum" on the bottom navigation menu.

Click on "Visiting" on the top navigation bar.
Read content on both sections and fail to find map.

Hover over "Visiting" on the top navigation bar and see a new link titled "Map". This rollover link is only available after you have clicked on "Visiting" for the first time.

You should now be able to see a map with text too small to read and no print button.

The non-flash version of the site doesn't even have a link to the map.

If anyone would like to know where the British Design Museum is, then they can try this map instead.