Autonomy : Jamming visitors’ radar

Four animated panels make for a distracting home page.

The Site

Autonomy, a leading producer of artificial intelligence systems, runs four different animated panels in discrete parts of its home page.

The central content area of Autonomy’s home page is dominated by a viewing panel that runs an automatic sequence of six promotions for company marketing and service propositions. Images fade and solidify at changeover, followed by the unscrolling of a text box containing the message. Above this and sandwiching the main navigation bar is a header strip with two moving elements: a scroll of Global Customers at far left and a central sequence of pull-quotes to back up the slogan ‘Understanding the hidden 80%’.

Elsewhere, an Industry Awards box in the bottom right corner of the page runs a flashing sequence of award logos, many of them brightly coloured in contrast with the predominantly blue hues and pastel shades of the rest of the page.

The Takeaway

Autonomy’s home page has more animation than the average ‘win a fortune’ pop-up or the starship Enterprise’s control panel. How much it helps visitors steer a course to content they want to find – or even that Autonomy wants them to seek out – is questionable. While a sequential showcase is part of many high-tech companies’ home pages its use here is purely promotional; clicking on an image does not take you to related content and if there is a correlation with the six brand buttons below the panel (which lead to product sites) this is not explained nor the connection made between image and corresponding button. The movement generated by the three other animations is simply distracting to the visitor’s radar, not least in diverting attention from the main showcase.

Incidentally, Autonomy must hope that with so much going on no one lingers too long over the ‘Understanding the hidden 80%’ slogan, which is explained by the picture of an iceberg alongside it. Or not, if you follow the consensus view on Wikipedia of 90 per cent submersion.

First published on 26 February, 2008