A Bad or Challenging Interface: Berkshire Hathaway
Today we’ll be taking a look at a website that simply shouldn’t exist in its current form: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/. As I was looking for websites to examine this week, I came across Berkshire Hathaway and was immediately intrigued — and a little shocked — at the fact that this website looks like it hasn’t changed since its inception in the 1990s.
Following a bit of research, I found that Berkshire Hathaway has, in fact, stayed nearly the same since it was first built, with minor changes to the “logo” header and the page itself. While the bare-bones, bulleted design does fit with Warren Buffet’s approach to business and life, I can’t help but wonder if a redesign might help Buffet continue to appeal to current and future generations. At the moment, Berkshire Hathaway is a laundry list of links, reports, and glorified blog posts, drawing some Craiglist comparisons. Below, I navigated to the top post on the page, a message from Buffet himself:
This is the entire page. The combination of left and center alignments, as well as the text color and lack of anything else on the page presents something that looks more like an error message than a Geico/Borsheim’s advertisement from the CEO. Berkshire Hathaway’s logo also notably doesn’t appear on this page — we’re also missing a menu, bottom text, and links of any kind. The startling lack of continuity and usability (redeemed only slightly by the same font used across the website) continues across every webpage I visited.
Above is the webpage for the first quarter of 2020 — which, interestingly, does have the Berkshire Hathaway logo. However, the logo isn’t clickable (surprise surprise) and takes you nowhere, much less back to the homepage. Additionally, this page sets off alarm bells in my head: as someone who uses the internet frequently, links like the pdf above could just as easily be a scam, leading me to quickly click away from the page. When we back up a step, we land on this strangely-colored page:
Why color here, why now? The irregular and strange color treatment across the rest of the website (red for pages you visit? Really?) also stakes its claim here.
Perhaps the strangest part of this website was the way links suddenly transported me to side websites that could easily be collected under the “BerkshireHathaway.com” roof as tabs on a normal website might be. “Berkshire Activewear” on the home page took me to this website:
Looks to me like the 2020 collection might belong in 2005. However, everything about this website works nicely, at least in comparison to the original website. While complete with a full complement of properly working links in the top menu, a search bar, and a bottom menu with links, this website could use an update and some more readability (maybe even a “dark mode” toggle, if we’re getting fancy), but still presents a painful contrast between a website that actually works and one that… doesn’t. Also, incredibly, berkshirewear.com has a favicon in the browser tab! Berkshirehathaway.com misses this crucial piece to help users find it — I lost this website multiple times while going back and forth between Medium and the Berkshire Hathaway tab I had, assuming it was a pdf I had open.
Overall, I was disappointed with my browsing experience on Berkshire Hathaway — to the average consumer who might be interested in learning more about this company, the homepage for one of the wealthiest companies in the business looks like a dated wiki page or a Craigslist spinoff. While Berkshire Hathaway is popular enough that it doesn’t actually need new customers, having a website that doesn’t actively deter interested potential consumers could be a plus. With the multiple companies BH houses under its roof as well, perhaps something that interests the average consumer would pull more sales for Geico, See’s Candies, and Kraft Heinz. A professional, yet accessible experience for a Berkshire Hathaway customer could increase interest, sales, and popular opinion of the company. Maybe someday we’ll see a BH homepage that doesn’t actively deter someone who stumbles upon it!
