I'm taking a HCI course (human computer interaction) and as part of our final project we have to find a website with some poor design elements. The Oculus website is a great example. Granted, there is some good stuff there, but functionally a lot of lacking.

This would fix a ton of problems: Imgur

Here is a rough draft of some of the site's usability issues I'm using in my project (might not be 100% accurate, still a work in progress):

General site navigation: The site uses some elements of the CRAP design process well. There is high contrast color scheme that looks sharp and the alignment is solid. However, the proximity of important elements to one another is often unnecessarily large. The user must scroll through a great deal of extraneous images and promotional material to reach the critical menus for the site forums, products, account information, etc. The repetition in some of the menus is also poor. For example, under the Community section on the main page there are only a few options (but space for many more). On subsequent pages there are more options added under the Community section that could have easily been added to the main page’s Community section to save time navigating through superfluous menus/pages.

Oculus account creation: Currently there is no link to create an Oculus account from the landing page. There isn’t an option to create an account from the Rift subpage either. One of the only ways I have found to create an account is by going to the forums and then registering. It is unclear if this is just a forum account or also an account to be used on the main site (for orders and profile information). The other way is to go to Support -> Oculus Rift -> Oculus Account -> Account Details -> Sign-up! Either way, it is not intuitive to register for an account.

Login to an Oculus account: Similar to account creation, there is nowhere on the landing page to login to one’s account. The user can login through the forums but the forums button is all the way at the bottom of the page. The page has a plethora of extraneous images and information that must be scrolled through in order to get to the bottom of the page. Otherwise, the user must go to the order page, click order now, and then there is a symbol to login. Checking the order history page also allows the user to login but this is not necessarily intuitive because on most sites the user has to login first and then can check their order history.

Check order status: If the user has made an order it is not easy to check on their order status. The order for the user’s hardware (Oculus Rift) can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the main page and clicking ‘support’ under the Community section. The Community section at the bottom of the support page has new options such as Order History (in addition to the same options listed under Community from the main page). This does not adhere to CRAP design principles because there is not repetition in how the menus are displayed. It would make more sense to have the some options listed under Community on all pages. If the user logs in through the site’s forums they are shown a different order history. Instead of displaying the ordered hardware, if the user selects Order History from the forums they are shown a history of the software they have ordered such as pre-order bonuses. It does not make sense to have separate order history areas that are each only accessible by following different arbitrary routes.

Update account information: There is not an easy way to access the user’s account profile information. If the user selects Support -> Oculus Rift -> Oculus Account -> Account Details they are not given any of their information, even if they are currently signed in. The user is told that they must update information like their profile picture from the Oculus Home application which is external to the Oculus website (Oculus Home is sort of like Steam for VR games). However, under the forums a user can update their profile picture. It is unclear if the forum profile picture is the same as the Oculus account picture. I would make an assumption that it that is it the same because if you sign in either way (through the forums or from the Oculus site proper) you are signed in on both. However, there is no obvious link anywhere on the site to download Oculus Home so it is hard to check for sure. (Note: there is a page on the Oculus site that I found a link to on Reddit, but there is nowhere to navigate to that page from the main site without having the direct link. It seems that when users receive their Oculus Rift products they may be provided with a link to the download page).