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Quinnipiac Assignment 02 – ICM 512 – Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment

For User-Centered Design Class, I compared Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment.

I Looked at Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment

For two sites with the same ostensible purpose – assisting users with hiring musicians – Harrison Parrott and Sam Hill could scarcely be more different.

Harrison Parrott

From the beginning, the Harrison Parrott site is all about the hiring of classical performers.

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
Harrison Parrott Front Page

The slide show changes, but the images are all clearly associated with classical performing arts, such as chamber music or opera. There is a lot of white space and the headings are simple and clear.

Analysis

Scrolling down, the next part of the front page revealed the Featured News portion of the website. The slideshow at the very top is apparently the really important news, whereas the middle portion has smaller images and isn’t a moving slideshow.

Their Featured News seems as if it is slightly older, but everything has a date range within the month of May, 2015. This gave the site an up to date look and feel.

Their About Section

Harrison Parrot vs Sam Hill
Featured news portion of front page

Scrolling down, the next part of the front page revealed the About section. This part also contained social sharing buttons for LinkedIn and Twitter, and a Twitter stream.

Harrison Parrott has done its homework, particularly given the demographics for LinkedIn (urban, over age 30, many with college educations, and 44% with an income of over $77,000 per annum) and for classical music aficionados (median age of concert goers is 49).

As well as they can, Harrison Parrott is matching a typical classical art aficionado buyer persona with the closest social media platforms that they can find.

Artists Tab

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
About portion of Harrison Parrott site

I clicked on the Artists tab, and was presented with large clickable images of artists with brief verbiage about what each of them does.

The tiles are clickable and everybody’s got their own page.

A quick perusal on my phone (I have a Nokia so the screen is a little smaller than an iPhone) revealed that the site is pretty easy to navigate.

Harrison Parrot vs Sam Hill

Although the hamburger icon is unexpectedly in the upper left corner of the small phone screen. This detracted from usability but only momentarily.

In all, it’s a well-designed site where the user can readily locate nearly anything. As Jakob Nielsen notes in The Need for Web Design Standards,

“Standards ensure that users

  • … don’t miss important features because they overlook a non-standard design element”

While the logo isn’t in the upper left corner (it’s centered at the top), it’s still easy to spot. Doing double duty, the logo serves as a link to return to the home page. To minimize confusion, there is also a small house icon in the upper left corner, another way to return home from anywhere on the site.

Sam Hill Entertainment

Sam Hill is a site for booking bands for weddings, parties and the like. First head to the home page, and you get this:

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
Sam Hill Home Page

So, I’m not really sure what the images on each side are for, as there are no links behind them. But this is it for the front page. Everything is above the fold because there is no fold.

But the site is not optimized for mobile. The side images look even more out of place, and there is a ton of unused white space at the bottom of my screen. The print is tiny. I had to zoom in if I wanted to click anything. Without the twin images, there might have been larger print.

Selecting the Browse By Musical Style tab, I found grouped choices. E. g. Motown, Soul, Oldies, Beach, and Variety are all  together.

Analysis and Research

I chose the musical style at the bottom of the tab: Decade, Tribute, Novelty Acts.

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
Massachusetts Decade, Tribute and Novelty Acts

Then I chose Massachusetts from a menu of states, and got to this screen:

The colors are still washed out. And the print is still too small on my phone, but at least those two images are not there.

I clicked the page for The Real Geniuses and finally found a page that looked good on my phone. I scrolled down and found this:

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
The Real Geniuses

Their FAQ

The FAQ has its own page and its own link (upper right corner of every page), but it’s also on all of the band pages. The placement of the FAQ link does follow the Web Style Guide, but the placement of another copy of the FAQ on every single band page does not.

Harrison Parrott vs. Sam Hill Entertainment
Sam Hill FAQ

Furthermore, from a developmental standpoint, placing the FAQ on every page creates a nightmare if the document ever changes. I viewed the page source, and the FAQ doesn’t have a link from somewhere. Instead, the verbiage is in the page itself.

This includes a statement that the offices are in Charlottesville, Virginia. If the offices ever move to, say, Pittsburgh, the webmaster will need to change code on over ten pages, and that’s just for bands that serve Massachusetts.

 

Conclusion

Between the two sites, Harrison Parrott is just plain better. It’s easy to follow and find what you need. Sam Hill could learn a few things from them.

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