Buzzfeed Review

Buzzfeed is an American news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media and serves as a one-stop-shop for all things pop culture related. Buzzfeed’s website functions well, but I would make a few changes. 

As far as the tone and voice of the website goes, Buzzfeed does a good job of tailoring to their respective audience. While there are a myriad of writers for the website, Buzzfeed has a consistently quirky tone. The headlines are eye-catching and every article/quiz has an accompanying photo. The graphics allow users to gauge the content more efficiently.

The content is easy to navigate and the homepage lays out a clear hierarchy of information. The trending and most recent content is featured on the homepage, and different forms of content are marked with different colored circles with a symbol or keyword. There’s a search bar and different shortcuts to navigate the website. It’s easy for the user to know where they are on the website and where they can go. 

This isn’t true for every shortcut though. The shortcuts labeled “Tasty” and “News” take the user to a completely different website and exit Buzzfeed, rather than opening a new tab. These websites, I assume, are owned by Buzzfeed, but that isn’t entirely clear since they have different names with no mention of Buzzfeed. These separate websites for news and food content have many advertisements throughout the homepage, which I found made the sites a bit glitchy–The ads covered up some content and were hard to close out of. 

As far as the actual content on the website, I noticed a couple of issues. Every article is broken up into digestible chunks of information, with many photos and hyperlinks available to the reader. This works for some of the articles, but for many of them, I feel like the lack of depth leaves the reader with many questions. Buzzfeed isn’t a reliable source for a reason. The title may suggest that you’re going to get the complete inside scoop about something, but the content actually doesn’t actually delve into anything of substance. 

The hyperlinks within the articles are very inconsistent and prohibit usability in some cases. Sometimes the links will open a new tab to another source, and sometimes they will take you out of the website completely. I did like that at the end of every article/quiz there is a lot of related content. The related content will always keep you on the website and not take you to the other websites that Buzzfeed owns, which I appreciated. 

I was a bit bothered by the fact that the home page refreshes each time you go back to it. So If you were to see an article there that you wanted to go back to, it most likely wouldn’t be there anymore. The actual layout of the site is easy to navigate and separates the information in a way that isn’t overwhelming or complicated for the user.

Image from Flickr



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