For this assignment I compared the webpages of three online pharmacy companies: Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Drugstore.com
Overall, the websites of all three companies were very visually overwhelming. The homepage of all three had lots of bright colors, bold font for most text, and at least 15-30 different images. All three also had a moving or looped window within the home page that rotated to show 3-5 different adds. It felt like too much color and too many images on the first page a person would see when they opened the link to that company’s website. The strong stimulus of the moving images and bright colors even made the search bar, where a person would look for the specific product they needed, almost blend in and was difficult to find immediately. I think this strong stimulus would also be particularly difficult for a person with a visual disability to navigate. I looked at the Glaucoma Foundation website as the textbook exercise suggested and the design of that page was much much calmer and more simplistic than any of the three pharmacy companies websites. The colors on the Glaucoma Foundation website were very calm, mostly grays and whites. The sitemap and search bar were easy to location and were not overwhelmed by strong colors, text, images on the opening page.
None of the three drugstore companies had any options for multilingual people shopping on their website. I don’t think it is uncommon to be able to switch the text of a website belonging to a major company into Spanish from English. With the millions of Spanish speakers in the United States, this would seem like a beneficial company strategy. All of the people featured in advertisement photos on the three websites were caucasian and appeared fairly stereotypically American. Inclusion of advertisements featuring more diverse people would probably help present the drug companies as more multicultural.
I felt that none of these three companies websites were very user-friendly for anyone with a visual disability nor especially approachable for people from other cultures or other language speakers. While the three websites were of course different in their specifics, the exact same problems were shared between the sites in different forms.
https://www.riteaid.com/
https://www.drugstore.com/
https://www.walgreens.com/