Kompas.com: A usability case study

1. Introduction
2. Usability issues
3. Summary

1. Introduction

   Kompas.com (Kompas Cyber Media/KCM) as a news website in Indonesia is as popular as its offline version, the Kompas daily newspaper. In the beginning, Kompas.com was intended to be the exact online version of the Kompas newspaper. However, at present Kompas.com has become more than a news website that still relies on news as its main content and identity.

   The purpose of this study is to give an example of a web usability review on a news web site, particularly Kompas.com. The review only emphasises on some basic usability issues. It is not intended to be a comprehensive review that leads to any conclusive solution. Nevertheless, it is interesting to do a review on Kompas.com for several reasons:

   • Its popularity. It is estimated that Kompas.com are visited by 600,000 unique visitors monthly with 16 million accessed pages. The audience ranges from the Indonesians living in Indonesia and abroad to the expatriates in Indonesia.

   • Its history. In 1995, KCM was born as Kompas online, which was the extension of the Kompas daily newspaper on the Internet. After three years, Kompas online was mature enough as an independent business division and changed its name into Kompas Cyber Media (KCM).

   • Its development. The content, structure, and visual design of Kompas.com have changed dynamically and radically since 1995 and they still are.

   • Its content. The content of Kompas.com has evolved from pure news into "almost" everything.

   • Its business model. Starting as a pure news provider, Kompas.com has evolved into a portal that provides various services and solutions, while at the same time taking the advantage of on-line advertisements.

2. Usability issues

   1. Advertisement blindness.
      Pop up (5.8K, 3sec@28.8Kbps), blinking (13K, 6sec@28.8Kbps), scrolling (1.78K, 2sec@28.8Kbps) and randomly moving (11K, 5sec@28.8Kbps) advertisements are not only distracting but also annoying to some degree. They severely prohibit rapid visual scanning and consistently distracting the users from gaining the information that they need. The worst of all, the users do not have control over them.
      Despite of the KCM's "evil" intention to attract the attention of users and benefit from the on-line advertisements, this is an unpopular short-term strategy, which furthermore will degrade the loyalty index of KCM in a long run.

   2. Page length.
      KCM tries to put a large amount of content on its main page. One of the significant impacts of this design decision is the increasing page length. A long page tends to force users to scroll down in their quest for information that they cannot find in the first fold of the page (the first part of the page that the users view on their browser). Unnecessary scrolling happens when a fold does not communicate what the users can expect from the subsequent folds, and unfortunately this is the condition of the main page (116.8K, 42sec@28.8Kbps).

   3. Inconsistencies.
      The main impact of inconsistencies is the increasing cognitive load that leads a web site on the right track to become unusable. Some of the easily spotted inconsistencies include: title (16.9K, 7sec@28.8Kbps) and navigation (88.6K, 32sec@28.8Kbps).

   4. Non redundant redundancy is confusing.
      Some of the reasons in applying redundancy include: amplification and ease of navigation. However, the purpose of redundancy at the main page of KCM is unclear because they are similar yet different (60.32K, 22sec@28.8Kbps). This leads to confusion rather than amplification or ease of navigation. Due to the increasing user interface complexity and the difficulty to understand duplicates, Nielsen even proposes the reduction of redundancy.

   5. Unfinished pages. To make users disappointed and unsatisfied are the main causes of the increasing abandonment rate and the decreasing of loyalty index. Unfinished pages (9.62K, 4sec@28.8Kbps), broken links, and incomplete information are some instances that encourage these things to happen.

   6. Groups. The role of groups in an information-heavy web site is important. Users usually confirm their "clicking intuition" by seeing other links and elements near by or within a group. This is the main reason why the elements within a group have to reflect and communicate the group identity. Furthermore, the relationship between the elements within a group should be clear and should make sense to enable users finding relevant information. These are some instances (11.1K, 5sec@28.8Kbps) of grouping issues that KCM has to figure out.

3. Summary

   This web usability review is not intended to be a thorough usability assessment or evaluation. Instead, it should be considered as a part of discount usability engineering (heuristic evaluation). The number of usability problems found in this review is estimated to be less than 10 percent.

   Regardless of some usability issues that Kompas.com (KCM) has, its popularity as a news website in Indonesia is indisputable. An explanation to this phenomenon is in the content and some good design decisions. Another determinant is the popularity of Kompas daily newspaper that gives a significant thrust to the existence of KCM.

The screenshots were taken on 29th July 2002 between 11:00-11:30 a.m.(GMT+07:00).