I looked at the Charles Chusseau-Flaviens collection in part because it was the easiest to find on the Eastman House website. In addition to the Introduction and "Countries" links from geh.org (which I struggled to find, and only persisted in looking for because I knew there had to be more information/collections or the George Eastman House wouldn't have been an option for this assignment), there is a archival finding aid linked from the George Eastman House's Photography Collection page - the only such "modern" finding aid I was able to locate. (One hopes that they are simply in the middle of updating online access to their collections, and will be adding more of these finding aids to the Photography Collection page over time. Otherwise this is baffling, and will probably impede rather than enhance researcher access.)
Aside from being nearly impossible to find, geh.org seems to be a very old website - its header mentions TELNET, which is basically ancient in the internet time scale. This is not inherently bad - the simple, text-based design is ugly but functional, and unlikely to break in any web browser. The George Eastman House seems to have taken the opportunity to group its collections in ways they believed might help researchers find what they needed - there's a photographer index, a subject index (that seems highly incomplete, but may have been intended for a relatively specific function such as bringing together photographs from multiple collections on a few of their most commonly-requested subjects), and a few groupings by photographic medium/technology.
Unfortunately, the simple site doesn't provide a great deal of the information that I am accustomed to seeing, both as an archivist who creates finding aids and as a researcher who uses them (albeit not for photographic collections in either case). The Chusseau-Flaviens collection does at least have an Introduction page that covers several of the elements commonly included in finding aids, providing some context and scope for the collection. But many of the George Eastman House's collections don't have introductions; indeed, the types of information provided for each collection vary substantially throughout even the index of photographers: Introduction, Checklist, Thumbnails, and Index seem to be the most standard, but some have specific kinds of indexes that create confusion about how to investigate any given collection. The text-based George Eastman House finding aids seem to use "Index" where archivists use "series" - so a single-series collection has one Index page, while a multiple-series collection has a landing page with a unique title ("Countries," in the case of Chusseau-Flaviens) than links to series-level Indexes.
The Chusseau-Flaviens collection-level index is by country, broken down into Checklist, Thumbnails, and Index pages whose functions are not immediately clear from context. While this general structure does indicate some multi-level description (and fairly clearly conveys the organizational principles behind the collection), the text-based website handles it poorly and demands a large number of click-throughs to find actual information. Additionally, each of these pages is partly repetitive - the Checklist contains the most information (thumbnails, titles, and even more), while the Thumbnails page contains only a table of image thumbnails, and the Index contains only photograph titles.
The archival finding aid improves on the plain text finding aid in multiple ways. Its description and contextual information is more robust, and it explicitly declares the country-based organizational structure of the collection rather than just implicitly conveying it through the organization of the finding aid. The archival finding aid also has more information on collection use, the history and provenance of the collection, and related materials. Some of the information is likely boilerplate or otherwise largely repeatable, and the encoded archival finding aid is an established tool for handling this kind of information. The long list of subject terms could be better handled (it requires paging down through a few screens of terms, generally considered a negative for effective web design), perhaps by making it collapsible by the user or auto-collapsed at page load, or by styling the page so that the terms appear in two or more shorter columns rather than one very long one.
Unfortunately, the archival finding aid links out to the Thumbnails pages of the plain text finding aid. This presents the researcher with about a sentence of contextual information for the series, followed by a page of digital images only - no accompanying text or titles. It would have been far more effective to link to the checklist pages, which attach each thumbnail to its title. The ideal action might be to have those links lead to some kind of digital repository with better features and/or better design that the plain text finding aids, but using the Checklist pages rather than the Thumbnails would be a simple action that would greatly improve the usability of the finding aid and the collection.
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