It's a webpage from the future! All of the tags are lowercase and some of them have these "style=" attributes with some weird programming language in them!
Seriously?! If search engines had AI, I can see it being cool/innovative. With the current state of search technology, it's a usability disaster.
Problem #1 - language. Is their portfolio page called "portfolio"? Or "companies we've invested in?" Is their contact page called "contact"? Or "Get in touch?" Do they have a blog? Searching for "blog" seems to indicate that they don't-- unless it's called something other than "blog". Search is hard and they are making their users play "guess the right search query" when a scan/browse action would be easier and less error prone.
Problem #2 - scan-ability. So say I AM interest in learning more about their portfolio. Roughly what types of companies do they back (what's the search query to answer that question?)? What have they backed most recently (again, what search query?)? Who works there (a search for partners suggests "Energy (partners)")? Scanning is a huge part of web behavior.
Problem #3 - discoverability. What about what I'm NOT searching for? They have some GREAT content around how to pitch VCs, what ideas are VC-worthy, etc. With a content-free page, there is a 0% chance of me learning about stuff that I didn't know I was looking for.
Problem #4 - SPELLING. Take a look at their partner page (if you can find it). Are there any names there that you might have trouble spelling/searching for if you heard it at a dinner party last night?
We don't have to guess with usability. What they SHOULD have done is write down 5 tasks that people might do at their site and had a few friends run a few informal tests.
I'm willing to turn in my UX designer badge if my guess is wrong and this UI increases task performance speed and reduces errors.
Hrm, as I consider it-- I guess your comment doesn't dispute all that. It probably can be cool, innovative, AND a usability disaster.
Apparently the BLINK tag doesn't actually work in some modern browsers, so I had to reimplement it in JavaScript. If you'd like to use it on your own site, here's the code:
var blinkOn = 1;
window.setInterval(function() {
var blinks = document.getElementsByTagName("blink");
for (var i = 0; i < blinks.length; i++)
blinks[i].style.visibility = blinkOn ? "visible" : "hidden";
blinkOn ^= 1;
}, 500);
Just a small note - you should not explicitly set the visibility to "visible", set it to the empty string "" instead. This way you don't overwrite the default property if it was something else.
That's actually way slower because you're doing a comparison within an iteration. That's putting an if statement inside a loop while the result is the same for every iteration.
