A while ago, I offhandedly mentioned how…unintuitive, to put it neutrally, IOI’s website is for players to navigate. Since 2024, the site has had minor updates to the User Experience, but it otherwise hasn’t changes that much. It’s been on my mind for a while, so I may as well talk about it in great length here. I was brought up on 2015-era visual design at college. I was essentially taught web design and how advertising works. Clean design was in, and still is right now (until we go back to glass, thank you Apple). Anyway, Here we go.
To put it bluntly, the main website is not made for players to peruse, or people interested in learning about the new things happening in Hitman. It’s designed very carefully to look like a tech-startup website, with the flashy animations and visual design language of “glossy, yet clean”. Everything IO wants you to know has a place on the home page. And that’s not bad, that makes some sense to do, it’s just heavily weighted to one audience over another.
Note the lack of Hitman on the immediate part of the home page. There’s a banner for First Light, there’s a motto for the company and their ideals. But their games and projects are oddly hidden away. It’s the second-to-last part of the site you see, it’s not front-and-centre. They’re displaying everything except the game they’re currently supporting. The “latest News” scroll box (which is closer to the top) does showcase Hitman News, but it mostly only talks about the Celebrities and other marketable aspects of the game, not the fact there’s new patch notes or a new roadmap, it showcases the “exciting” stuff. Hitman isn’t even in the top three of the buttons!
Game news is not what turns the heads for the intended audience of the site (investors and collaborators), what turns heads is the upcoming releases, and the collaborations, and the news of new hires and studio openings. There’s still some Hitman news, but it’s very downplayed overall. The Hitman page is buried, for all intents and purposes.
And before people point to the very top of the page with the “games” menu option, the design of the site clearly funnels you downward, not on top, and is not that prominent, being white text overlaid on top of an image with no drop-shadows or a box behind it to make it stand out. I dare say having that menu bar at all is a bit redundant.
Oh yeah, speaking of drop shadows…
Please put drop shadows on your website text!
I hate the lack of drop-shadows in the game HUD, but the fact it’s not on the site is very questionable. This page is insanely hard to read for those with glasses or those who don’t pay attention to the banner. Yellow, and a lot of other bright, attractive colours, do not contrast well with White text. The solution to make it more readable is by adding a drop-shadow to make it stand-out to readers, as it signifies it’s important, and it looks more professional in general.
The index text on top of 47’s chin is also ridiculously small, and is also faded so it’s even harder to read! It has a unique animation so you know you’re mousing over it, but the white colour is not restored. It’s not like this index follows you around the page, so the fact it’s desaturated to give prominence on which part of the page you’re on makes no goddamn sense!
This sounds like a nitpick, but fonts and colours absolutely matter.
And finally, we come to the most irritating part of the site. Reading…anything in news panels.
This is insane. It goes against all conventions of reading in the western world, and seems to go off on the logic that people are comfortable reading on the right-hand side of their computer monitor, and then suddently, have to move over to the left for the titles!
Not only does this leave a massive gap on the left-hand side where the panel isn’t covering the rest of the page (because the site needs to impress us that we’re overlaying it!), but the titles in the middle leave a fuck-ton of wasted negative space. It’s never used for images, outside the banner. And it’s only formatted like this because it all condenses down on mobile perfectly to be centralised!
It’s very clever, IO, your site condenses down to centralise itself on mobile! Colour me impressed even! But you’re taking away readability on desktop to be this clever, and ruining the reading experience in the process. It is maddening how bad this is on desktop, solely to benefit mobile readers and nobody else. Even on tablets, this doesn’t condense properly.
There is a rule in web design that mobiles come first, and that’s true here too. But that’s usually done to condense all images and text into a central format. People read from left-middle-right online, so images and text on the left and right get pushed to the centre of the page to be centralised on mobile because of the limited screen real-estate.
As mentioned,people like reading from the centre of pages. You can even get away with doing this on the left (a lot of sites do start on the left, Reddit for example), but putting long paragraphs of text on the right, and sprawling titles in the middle leads to no reading cohesion, and is the worst of all possible solutions. Please, just make the panel bigger, and centralise everything. It would be much less irritating to read.
Anyway. That’s my feedback on IO’s website and the design of it. I really hope to see some improvements soon, because this has been annoying me for a while now.
PS: @IOI_Artjoms, if you could bring this up with the webmaster, please do so. Please save us from this reading comprehension nightmare!