Looking to get tickets for your favorite band at Boston’s Paradise club? All you need to do is go to TheDise.com and look up the show in their calendar, right? Well, not quite.

First, you have to get past the clubs’ splash page:

It’s a nice graphic, representing the façade of the Paradise’s historic venue. But a building façade is not the same as a web site entrance.

How do you get to the content on the site? Well, you have to read the small print at the bottom of the page: just click on the doors.

The doors? Why of course! Why didn’t we think of that.

Splash pages are bad enough. Designers include them to bring special attention to their work, but users never pay attention. They either ignore the page or get frustrated at the roadblock in front of completing their task.

The added insult to the injury is when the splash page hides the next step. In this case, the user has to noodle around until they discover the doors are the entrance to the site. Eventually, they may see the small print at the bottom, but the chances are slim that will just right out. They’ll be held captive on this page until they discover the secret egress.

If you have to add small print at the bottom to explain where to click, do you think there is a redesign to consider?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.