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Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
yoey writes "Another famous Nielsen year-end wrapup: "Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.""
And in 1992 the winner of this award would have gotten it for having a plain website, because blink tags were oh so cool...
You know what's a nice usability feature? A server that can handle the load. You click on the link, the page loads. Nielsen should get one of them.
I know this entire thread will probably turn into some sort of grip session, so I'll just throw the first volley:
Number one: no website contact for links not working etc, ie American Express, etc.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Forgetting to prepare server for /. effect
Its incredibly frustrating to have to roam a site for several minutes to be able to find what you are looking for. Is it that much trouble to put together a good site map and link to it from the home page?
Worst. Sig. Ever.
Having a server that can be slashdotted so quickly with something as likely to be slashdotted as this.
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
It seems to me that some web designers use it almost like a crutch. As if some needless animation that I have to wait through is going to enhance my enjoyment of a website. If anything, it just makes me want to visit elsewhere.
He's had his 15 minutes.
One word: Flash.
Two words: Flash Intro
Yeah sure, it can be done right, but the other 99.9% of the time I hate the world.
-Rabbit
Oh... wait.... thats a hard drive, CPU and motherboard I see burning, not a yule log.
Oh well, shame there isn't a Google cache for this.
Getting your site linked to on the front page of /.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, December 23, 2002: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 Summary: Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002. 1. No Prices No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out. Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is key in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones. 2. Inflexible Search Engines Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody. A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products. 3. Horizontal Scrolling Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's much more common. Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little relative to the annoyance of horizontal scrolling (and the space consumed by the horizontal scrollbar). 4. Fixed Font Size Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40. Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels. 5. Blocks of Text A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read. Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks: subheads bulleted lists highlighted keywords short paragraphs the inverted pyramid a simple writing style, and de-fluffed language devoid of marketese. 6. JavaScript in Links Links are the Web's basic building blocks, and users' ability to understand them and to use various browser features correctly is key to enhancing their online skills. Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser's standard behavior. Users deserve to control their own destiny. Computers that behave consistently empower people by letting them use their own tools and wield them accurately. 7. Infrequently Asked Questions in FAQ Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation. 8. Collecting Email Addresses Without a Privacy Policy Users are getting very protective of their inboxes. Every time a website asks for an email address, users react negatively in user testing. Don't assume that people will sign up for a newsletter just because it's free. You have to tell them, right there, what they will get and how frequently it will hit their mailboxes. Also, you must provide an explicit privacy statement or an opt-in checkbox right next to the entry field. Otherwise, you have little hope of collecting email addresses other than mickey@mouse.com. 9. URL > 75 Characters Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together. The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business. 10. Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations When you click a link on the Web, what do you expect? To get a new page that contains information about the anchor you just clicked. What don't you expect? To spawn an email program that demands that you write stuff rather than read it. Mailto links should be used on anchors that explicitly indicate that they're email addresses, either by their format (donald@duck.com) or their wording (send email to customer support). Don't place mailto links on names; clicking on people's names should usually lead to their biography. Again, interaction design must meet users' expectations. The more that things behave consistently, the more users understand what they can do and the greater their sense of system mastery. Violated expectations create a sense of oppression, where technology rules humans and reduces their ability to steer the interaction. Cartoons by Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers The Growing Importance of Email Integration It's interesting to note that the last three mistakes all relate to email. Despite being the oldest of the main Internet services, email continues to be one of the most important. It's also finally becoming better integrated with the Web, and I expect that this trend will continue (if websites can avoid making those mistakes, that is). Earlier Top-Ten Lists Most of these earlier top-ten lists are still highly relevant for today's websites. Even as we get new mistakes, the old ones don't go away, though (happily) they do get less common.
Our kids are excited about XBox and want to play online, but after visiting the XBox Live site I'm not sure it's going to happen. I spent about 30 minutes poking around on the site and found no information on pricing. This annoys me. I'm not going to buy something to find out how much it will cost.
slashdot broke my sig
lack of real world contact info. sometimes a phone call is required.
Doug
Having to enter my email address twice.
My other sig is extremely clever...
How about sites that code for IE only, and won't display anything, or broken tables, or text layered on top of other text..
It's also annoying when using a high res, small screen, as on a laptop, you crank up the font size in Mozilla or IE and the fixed size tables sites use to do layout make it impossible to read anything. ARGH!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
As usual, in 2002, we had too many conflicting standards and choices.
So long as this wonderful environment of competition and choice exists, we will continue to enjoy sub-standard results.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
For the love of god man! Learn to use the
tag...
I hate web pages that don't let you increase the font size. I think CSS is to blame for this, but I'm not sure. Well, to be fair, Mozilla seems to ALWAYS let you do that, which is one of several reasons why I prefer Mozilla over IE. However, I'm stuck with IE at work. In IE, you CAN enable some Accessibility options in order to achieve what Mozilla can always do, but it's just annoying. -Teckla
See the FAQ.
(and slashdot is a news site, not a blog)
The URL for this article has 70 characters, which is less then the 75 mentioned in mistake number 9. Of course, the post comment page is 109 characters, so I won't be giving it out to anyone over the phone very soon.
I think we should be much more worried about the trend in using flash for everything. I've seen sites that have whole link bars, with no special effects that warrant it, done in flash. Isn't that' what an href is for?
I do a lot of web developing and I've come realize that a lot of things that I want to do cannot be done without having Javascript in the link. While it is sometimes annoying when I'm browsing a site and cannot directly link to a page because they use a POSTed form inside of a Javascript, there are many many positive uses for Javascript, such as history.go(-1).
11. Lack of line breaks
Jason.
Summary: Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
lack of prices is always a good one. One of my end-of-year things to do at work was to come up with pricing for:
/. effect is always a problem. Hope nobody ever puts a link to *my* server up on /. my poor DSL line would be dead. :-P
(a) same software, but upgrades to our backup software on all servers.
(b) new backup system, Veritas Netbackup, Legato, etc...
so we could put in budget $$ for the most expensive option of (b), and evaluate them in 2003 and (probably) implement a real enterprise backup.
I could not find pricing on Veritas *anywhere* on the web, other than "*CALL*"... and I really just wanted a good ballpark figure. I don't want to be having sales rep's bugging me just yet, I just wanted to get some rough prices.
But.. yes... not being prepared for the
Hmmm, that should be a hard one to do, because a
<tag style="font-size:20px">
should do nothing more than render the font with that height, but still allow it to be resized, my website http://www.andrewvc.com uses this and using mozilla I can resize all the text perfectly.
Unfortuanatly, I just discovered that Internet Explorer 6 does not do and won't let me change the text size. Of what relevance is text in points to a web developer? As usual I expect all trolls to be bash me and tell me to use the standard. Well I don't care, no old people go to my site.
Photos.
Not letting people post their extremely witty comments anonymously so they can not look like an ass with their fake name attached to it.
Read number 5!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I don't know whether any other /.ers have this reaction, but WHITE text on a BLACK background makes me want to puke (quite literally) after I've been reading it for a couple minutes.
Black on white (or at least dark on light) is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html
How about this one?
Matrox make their chipset specs available for free download from http://devrel.matrox.com In order to get the useful ones, you have to register. No problem, I registered and recieved my password. Now I can see the documents I want (Great!). I click on the document, I am asked for my username and password again. Sure, no problem. Except that it does not accept my username and password (The one I am already logged in with!), and I cannot download the document.
That wouldn't have been so bad if the form you fill in to contact the Developer Relation team worked. Nope; you click "Submit" and you get a 404 instead. Real smooth.
I emailed them directly, and although it works now, I never recieved a response to indicate they were looking into it.
It is definatly one of the crueller broken websites I have seen (I needed that document, damnit!)
My vote is for the Apple store. I love their site. The prices and right there, and the photos are huge. I go there every few months to fantasize about owning an ibook. Kitchen Etc has a pretty good site too. I've never bought anything from either of them but I just like their designs- I think they get it right.
This account blacklists people who whine about karma. See bio.
a good thing would be to mention cross-platform and browser compatibility. Don't use Microsoft's arbitrary closed extensions. Make sure that the page validates as W3C code, or at least almost does it.
But many other things in the article were bulls-eye, like the tiny text.
Ciryon
Some consumer websites do not have a phone number on the site, so you cannot contact them by phone. I believe buy.com is one of these operators, there are no support or customer service numbers on the site, however a google search unearthed a number on some complaint site explaining their policy.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
Believe it or not I use lynx almost exclusively, and I can immediately tell a clueless webMeister from a good web master. If lynx runs your site, then the web master knows what he is doing. If not, you have a clueless keyboard monkey using Flash.
LOL
A few years ago, Jakob Nielsen was one of the few persons caring about usability. He did a lot for the community, and his AlertBox contained interesting articles wit a lot of practical tips.
But nowadays, Jacob has nothing to tell us anymore. Usually, his Alertbox contains well-known facts like the ones referenced to in this /. item, or only propaganda to sell his reports. I don't want to buy his report about the use of Macromedia Flash searchfunctions in intranets, I just want some practical information on how to make my sites more usable.
I know that I can find this kind of information on a thousand sites, and Jacob's site used to be one of them. But at this moment there is only one way to use his knowledge: pay for his reports and consulting.
Brain Tags |
For everyone's sake, I hope you meant gripe session.
At least if we take the common design mistakes as the metric.
'Poor email intergration' sounds pretty sophisticated compared to 'don't use the <blink> tag'.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
(And this will include Slashdot)
.gif to .png. Sites can see huge bandwidth savings if they make the switch, and the browsers are now mature enough to make the switch. Wired did it, why can't you?
Is websites that haven't moved on to standards compliance yet. It's time for people to start moving away from tables to CSS and from
how about sites that think mozilla can't render something?
...especially when mozilla 1.3a gets blocked but netscape 6.2.2 doesn't!
nothing quite as annoying as
"you need Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6.2.2+ to view this site"
solution: some browsers allow you to change the userAgent.
in mozilla, the prefbar plugin allows this (among other things).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Wow, you do a bad job and now the guy that showed you up is a dumbass? Cowboy Neal, do I get special Karma powers to /. individuals?
It's no wonder many sites lack prices considering Wal-Mart and company have copyrighted the combination of the dollar sign followed by a series of numbers, a period, and another series of numbers.
Why such a manual process to report a bad link? There are numerous tools available out there for tracking error responses from the web server access logs, why would you want to depend on a random user to report the error? You would get far less than helpful details from the majority of responses ("Uh that one link on that one page dun work") if anything at all. Automation is the key...
To apply your obscures gay subculture terms to the mainstream world doesn't make you bright nor autoritative. Go hide yourself where you from from, a cave, that is, big troll.
OK, this is not the fault of stylesheets. Internet Explorer does not allow the "zooming" of fonts set with pixel sizes. This is a shortcoming of Internet Explorer, not CSS. If this is so important to Nielsen (and I can see why it would be - my vision isn't so great either), perhaps he should look into using alternative browsers (Opera and Moz-based browsers all allow font zooming regardless of how the font size was set).
Am I the only one that see this as something lacking in most faq's.
You go to the page after looking through a manual to try and fix a problem. The manual has the normal things to look for, most a third grader would think of checking.
So finding nothing there you go to the page to be presented with a FAQ page that has the same third grade solutions. No more information, or anything that is even remotely usefull to solve the problem.
Get with it people I know to check to see if it's plugged in!!
Sheesh
DP
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
One big and common mistake is using Flash in a web site other than as animation content deep inside the page.
I've seen way too many sites where you must have Flash just to get to the home page, and common results are popup error messages due to having the wrong version, or a wait through an extremely annoying and unnecessary animation.
A page is a kludge if you have to open up the source to to find a way to bypass the flashdross.
These days I find fewer and fewer public and commercial websites that are relying on framesets for layout and navigation. IMHO, this is a good thing. However, I have noticed that a large number of web-based interfaces for commercial, enterprise-oriented applications, as well as many internal enterprise websites/web-applications, tend to rely very heavily on framesets.
I would like to see Nielsen revisit his 1996 critique of frames, perhaps exploring some of the technologies (PHP, JSP, ASP etc.*) that have provided better solutions to the problems frames initially tried to correct (dynamic navigation/content, rich GUI interface, etc.).
* While dynamic, server-generated content was around in 1996 (cgi, ssi, and shtml), it was not as widespread, nor was it as readily available to the average web-designer/developer.
Wow, you do a bad job and now the guy that showed you up is a dumbass? CowboyNeal, do I get special Karma powers to /. individuals?
4. Fixed Font Size
Sorry buddy. Get a REAL Browser, with full page zooming, not just silly text zooming. Opera
9. URL > 75 Characters
Not even realistic, we're past little html pages now, it's something called dynamic content. and without HTTP_GET you will be forced to fill out a form of where you would like to go (Think Web Application, Web Application...).
10. Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations
Add TheseTell the damned user to look at their STATUS BAR.
FLASH Navigation
FRAMES
REALLY BIG ADVERTISEMENTS
POP UP/UNDER/SIDEWAYS/THROUGH/OVER/AROUND... ADS
INEFFECTIVE (read: STUPID) use of COOKIES
...anyone else checkout this uber-tards picture and bio. This guy is an expert at what? Usability...so are users, so why is his opinion with two shits.
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
How about search engines that ignore words of 3 characters or less? ;)
If you can't read the text easily when the page first loads, and have to result to any sort of zooming, the web designer has already failed to design a good page.
Opera's not quite a real browser yet. I stopped using it earlier this year because way too often, it jumbled and messed up page elements in a way that MSIE and Mozilla never did. It was also poorly designed, with no thought to the user interface. Why complain about how much space banner ads take up with the badly designed button area in Opera wasted so much space already?
Stupid sites refusing the "+" in my site-specific e-mail addresses (so I can know who puts me on spam lists).
As the subject says, they were. Wish my wife could draw me cartoons.
I don't normall do this, but I noticed a lot of people complaining about the site being down. Here's the text, but if you can read his site, since the little cartoons that go along with each item are pretty funny:
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Summary:
Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.
As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
1. No Prices
No B2C ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's rife in B2B, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. We have miles of videotape of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out.
Even B2C sites often make the associated mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is key in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the most relevant ones.
2. Inflexible Search Engines
Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
3. Horizontal Scrolling
Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's much more common.
Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little relative to the annoyance of horizontal scrolling (and the space consumed by the horizontal scrollbar).
4. Fixed Font Size
Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.
Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
5. Blocks of Text
A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.
Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
subheads
bulleted lists
highlighted keywords
short paragraphs
the inverted pyramid
a simple writing style, and
de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.
6. JavaScript in Links
Links are the Web's basic building blocks, and users' ability to understand them and to use various browser features correctly is key to enhancing their online skills.
Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command -- assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser's standard behavior.
Users deserve to control their own destiny. Computers that behave consistently empower people by letting them use their own tools and wield them accurately.
7. Infrequently Asked Questions in FAQ
Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.
8. Collecting Email Addresses Without a Privacy Policy
Users are getting very protective of their inboxes. Every time a website asks for an email address, users react negatively in user testing.
Don't assume that people will sign up for a newsletter just because it's free. You have to tell them, right there, what they will get and how frequently it will hit their mailboxes. Also, you must provide an explicit privacy statement or an opt-in checkbox right next to the entry field. Otherwise, you have little hope of collecting email addresses other than mickey@mouse.com.
9. URL > 75 Characters
Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together.
The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
10. Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations
When you click a link on the Web, what do you expect? To get a new page that contains information about the anchor you just clicked.
What don't you expect? To spawn an email program that demands that you write stuff rather than read it.
Mailto links should be used on anchors that explicitly indicate that they're email addresses, either by their format (donald@duck.com) or their wording (send email to customer support). Don't place mailto links on names; clicking on people's names should usually lead to their biography.
Again, interaction design must meet users' expectations. The more that things behave consistently, the more users understand what they can do and the greater their sense of system mastery. Violated expectations create a sense of oppression, where technology rules humans and reduces their ability to steer the interaction.
Cartoons by
Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers
The Growing Importance of Email Integration
It's interesting to note that the last three mistakes all relate to email. Despite being the oldest of the main Internet services, email continues to be one of the most important. It's also finally becoming better integrated with the Web, and I expect that this trend will continue (if websites can avoid making those mistakes, that is).
There also seems to be a belief that obnoxious advertising improves sales for the advertised product and won't drive away viewers of the site which has the obnoxious ad.
At least, those surviving sites which still run the obnoxious ads believe that...
picasso did tons of abstract art nuthead.
Photos.
It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here
E C:www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
8 C:www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF -8
I particularly liked: 1999:
Slow Server Response Times
"Slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability: in my survey of the original "top-ten" mistakes, major sites had a truly horrifying 84% violation score with respect to the response time rule."
Took me a couple of minutes for that to download
In 1996, we had Overly Long Download Times
The previous version are Cached by google,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:pj5FFl38-p
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:tgqi1bumb7
Given the asswhupping this server just took, they might change the site's name to abuseit.com.
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
And in 2002 a completely worthless top ten. Come on, these seem more like things people would overlook which is pretty much the opposite of a "top ten" in my book.
...instead it's misleading hyperlinks?
What about lacking web standards support, ridiculous flash requirements, bad javascript (errors, popups, etc.), sound/music that automatically turns on (*grrrrr*), intro pages (of any kind: flash OR html), etc?
The only very valid point made was about FAQ's not being FAQ's. In a time where scripting is rampid I see no reason why FAQ's should not have been evolving as implimentation has become easier.
-Rabbit
You'd be amazed at how many people don't check. Seriously, those stupid rubbery power cords going into a plastic prong frame don't always hold snuggly in the correct position. I had a guy just the other day report his video had gone out and wanted me to come check it for him. He blew a $50 house call just for a monitor cable that had come loose from his video card. I suppose he saved money, though, as I would have charged $200 to set the machine up for him.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Did you notice the alt tags on the Nielsen site? I've never seen another site put that much effort into a page.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Fixed Font Size Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size.
They obviously used IE and not another browser which honors the users preferences.isn't he the one who collects info from set-top boxes, without telling the users that they are being watched?
At least the war on the environment is going well
(not that that site has it, its just the worst thing I get on the web...oh, that and the sites that make browsers crash...)
You can't take the sky from me...
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
As many people have mentioned, the site hosting this article is straining under the load of geeks looking for more material to turn into running gags. I think I managed to find the reason for this site's poor performance - a lack of high speed internet access.
From Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (1998):
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line today. It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law.
Starting about 2003, high-end users will have speeds corresponding to a personal T-1 line.
Of course, low-end users will be on ISDN lines in 2003, so high-end users' megabit access will still not sanction bloated design. Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.
It is amazing how easy it is to get an accurate approximation of the trend of internet connectivity speed from seven data points representing one person's internet connection speed over a span of 15 years.
So the site might not be responding well right now, but at least we get broadband next year...
long pages without
*cough* *hint* *cough*
Seems to me, that there is less Flash being used for content and more being used for banner ads. It could also be the selection of sites that I visit, though.
Flash does have its time and place and homestarrunner.com is one those places. Awesome site.
Having to enable pop-up adds in Mozilla is a big pain for those websites that refuse to load unless I do so. Fortunately, it is only a very small number of web site thus far.
Yes, I recognise this is how web sites make their money but a discreet advert in the corner of your site is much better than slamming a window in front of your site.
For the lazy:
Strong Bad's Website Lessons
Even if you hate flash, you've got to check this site out.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I've got apps where the users are, well, too stupid to know how to work a browser, and they require a Back button on the page itself.
This is the same user community I serve where my requirements say "all data must fit on an 800x600 screen without scrolling" which, after I put in the standard page header, navigation buttons on the bottom, etc., gives me eight records per page that the user has to flip through. Search for client "John Smith" in this system and you're paging through 10 or 15 screens before you get to the guy you're after. It'd be nice if they let me scale the font down a notch or two (it's set at the browser default) so I can fit 12 or 15 records, but they won't even allow that.
There are users out there, I sh!t you not, who if they don't see it screaming at them on the page, it doesn't exist. Scrollbars mean nothing, standard browser features (back button, etc.) mean nothing.
The UK Job Centre website has an irritating feature in the job search part, where you fill out a form selecting the type of job you want, before being asked where in the country you're looking for a job. My wife found this incredibly frustrating, as every time she wanted to alter the particularly narrow job type search parameters, she needed to re-enter the location.
;)
Another one I came across at the weekend was UGC Cinemas. I was trying to book tickets for LOTR. After I selected the location, the film, the time I wanted, selected how many tickets I wanted, entered my name, credit card details, email adress (with confirmation), phone number (with confirmation), and confirmed all the details, then and only then it decided to tell me that it couldn't go ahead with the booking because the showing was sold out. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just change the time to a later showing, but no, I'm back to the start and I have to re-enter everything again. It was only on my third attempt I found a showing with free seats...
At lease the film turned out ok!
It _did_ mention javascript, specifically in the context of windows popping up on clicking a link. It said that users should be able to control their own destiny and if they want a new window, they'll use their brower's function to open a link in a new window.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Anybody else think that the real problem with search engines is exactly the opposite? Ever struggle with an engine to be as explicit as possible, only to have it return a bunch of not-so-related crap?
It's time for /. to be more polite. You should tell web server administrators that they are going to get x100 load increase, at least a couple of hours ahead of time, so they can try to do something. This will benefit slashdotter (increasing the chances of accessing the web sites featured in the stories), and administrators, that will be able to simplify their sites, or at least know what hit them. And no, hiding the hand is not a good policy.
Too many websites focus on the bells, whistles, airhorns, and other attention-grabbers rather than the actual content. The content is the part they throw in at the last minute. They get all excited by the themes and frames and pretty pictures that move that they forget that websites need a purpose.
No one cares about your goddamn javascript nav bar!
The next time I see one of those "oh, look, here's Fifi eating an ice cream cone" websites I am gonna FLIP!
K
War does not determine who is right, war determines who is left.
URL > 75 Characters Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together. The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
There are two side points to this:
- To shorten your addresses and make your URLs more durable to change, point your links to www.foobar.com, NOT to www.foobar.com/default.htm (or index.jsp, or whatever).
- Don't invoke sessions unless absolutely needed. Sometimes these are in the URL, sometimes they are cookies. It is irritating to copy a URL, mail it to someone, and find that they can't access it because it is relying on a session which expired (in the case of a URL) or a session which their computer doesn't have (in the case of a cookie).
One kludge to get around massively long URLs is to use a service like ShortURL. Neat idea. But definitely a hack.Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
If you can't spell "Honolulu," you don't deserve to go there.
I could name lots of things shorter.
Jacob Nielsen; self-proclaimed web design guru; got lucky at early building of web community who all linked to each other calling each other 'another really good 'professional'' (see also David Siegel); /.; ;recently (2002) noticed that horizontal scrolling sucks (Congrats, Jacob!)
knows next to nothing about webdesign;
by common judgement of his site apears to be colorblind and run browsers with full HTML 2 support;
can bullshit really tough on webdesign, get's quoted on webdesign every odd month on
never get's quoted on alistapart.com;
is usually stated to be 'the ultimate webdesigner' by people who build sites like www.kornshell.com (yeah, dig those colors);
usually is absolutly unheard of buy people who aktually do webdesign
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Hey, dumbass #2, when you get a clue, figure out which comment I was replying to. Hint, it's the one without a single fucking line break, not the guy who has his shit together. Thanks anyway.
Most of the points he made are valid. Unfortunatly Nielson dosn't hold much credibility within the design commmunity. Many, including myself believe that he thinks the web should be vanilla plain, devoid of any asthetic value. His website reflects this.
He is a usability expert NOT a design expert.
Its not that difficult to create a site that is pleasing to the eye and conforms to usability guidelines. If he paid a 1/4th as much attention to design as he does to usability more designers would pay attention to what he is saying.
So is this where I stick a witty comment?
The site IS the map. If you need a separate 'site map' page to figure out where the information you're looking for can be found, then the organization of the site is not very good and should be reconsidered.
A well-designed and well-organized site only needs ONE method of navigation and it should be consistent throughout the site.
I'm 31 and have better than 20/20 eyes.
What does the first half of your sentence have to do with the second half? Are you trying to say that because you're 31 the rest of your comment (and prior comments) are more important? Do you want to brag about having good vision?
Anyways, I have an LCD running at 1280 x 1024, and the default font size (100% in Mozilla, Medium in IE) is just fine under Windows 2000. It's still a bit too small to benefit from 2000's built-in anti-aliasing, but the text is very clear. Gnome 2 looks fantastic, though, using the same sizes after turning on sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Granted, my LCD is running via DVI, so perhaps my experience is a bit different than the norm.
Also, you may not have noticed, but you no longer need a "monster graphics card" to run monitors at very high resolutions.
I wear shoes and require corrective lenses.
It's even more idiotic when a site REMOVES FUNCTIONALITY when they add Flash.
As an example, iKnowMed, uses Flash for their Navbar. This means that I can't even bookmark the different sections listed under the Navbar (Since my browser always thinks that it is at "/home.html"). Want to bookmark the "Events" page? Too bad. You MUST navigate the webpage maze EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Fucking stupid. Yet somehow these idiot webmasters still have a job and I can't find work!
But this is not the "Nielsen" we associate with ratings (TV, radio, etc).
And who is Jakob Nielson?
As opposed to the Nielsen ratingsSounds like a lot of people would tend to get the two mixed up.
I can think of some doozies:
Javascript
agazzillionflashpopupadds
pr0nsights
flashing
neon___ on neon ____
theoverdoneIwishIwasinJapaneseanimation
dhtml
xml
And I think it's just plain stupid. People, please, do this:and stick an a onlick= around your options. It's fast, it's easy, it doesnt add much clutter, and it's more widely supported than label tags. It is very annoying to have to click NOT what I want, but some tiny thing next to what I want, in order to get the option I want. I dont see why this setopt() practice isnt used on many more websites. I'd think at least
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
assuming that your default foreground is black... If you're gonna overwrite the users default color, at least overwrite all of them. Some people actually *like* green text on a black background (don't ask me why), but if you think their 'default' text will look fine on your nice green background image, just because your default text does, think again.
I hate Flash Intros. They usually do not add any information whatsoever: It's usually something like Company logo rotating in some nicely rendered light while a woman states the mission statement and says "How can we help you!?".
Dumb dumb dumb.
A Flash ad is like being asked to watch a TV ad for 30 seconds before you visit the webpage. I would much rather spend 5 seconds reading a two-line mission statement on the homepage then wait through an ad. This is the web, it's about interactivity.
If it doesn't enhance the information or interactivity of the site, don't clutter your site with this nonsense.
Behind every Flash intro is some marketing nut who doesn't understand the nature of the web, and is trying to apply their TV experience to the web.
If a site uses a Flash intro, I leave the site immediately. If I need to use the site, I always hit the "Skip" button. I never, ever watch the intro.
Flash CAN be useful for certain features. I've seen some pretty inovative uses of Flash for displaying complex information, as in an interactive map of New York city or something similar. Shockwave is sometimes useful for something like "Games". Unfortunately, I cannot find a site that is an example of Good Flash Usage.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Harlan Ellison still has blink tags. He also has a long anti-piracy rant written entirely in capital letters, but it's okay, because he hates the internet.
.PDFs of his books, and his webmaster spends all his time trying to convince people that he's not a fanboy who sprays a weak imitation of Harlan's style every time he sits down in front of a keyboard. They're both failing utterly and constantly falling further behind, but they are fully engaged, so the blink tag will probably stay there.
He spends all his time chasing down
Here's another example. Completely impossible to navigate this site without installing Flash. STUPID!
http://www.academyart.edu/
Believe it or not, last names are not unique. In other words, no, there is no relation between Jakob Nielsen the self-proclaimed web usability expert and Nielsen Research the TV rating people.
Second, participation in the Nielsen TV research program is voluntary. Nothing is collected without the users' knowledge. In fact, you need a special set-top box to participate.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
Also...maybe we ask them if it's alright if we mirror the story *in the article topic section* so that the servers won't GET /.ed. Just my thoughts.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This only works if you have a very big advertising budget and a very small product line, like McDonalds.
Nielsen's expertise and work on usability area must be acknowledged. Some papers I've read before have been very helpful.
How ever I think that commenting B2B pricing information, he hasn't been thinking (or aware) of more fundamental issues of B2B portals.
Best pricing rule in B2C business could be:
never compare your pricing with your expenses (after you have validated your revenue model)
In B2B business how ever better rule is:
keep no fixed price
Even in classical Porterian (sorry about this) theory you can see that both buyers and sellers have bargaining power that has significance in the market place.
THIS IS WHY most companies don't ever like to keep the price info in their pages - and especially in B2B cases where there are fewer customer this is a significant thing.
There are some studies which have shown that want of the most important reason why B2B business portals never really succeeded (or most of them) was that the price information was too visible and the buying process was too transparent.
Companies want you to call and discuss about prices, because then you became more closely related customer etc..
Of course I understand that Nielsen is mostly referring sites where the size of purchases are rather small (single software packages etc..), but what I said is true in many real B2B cases.
Just to sum up: perhaps the question about pricing information is not about poor UI design, but well thought business decision.
- not that I like that, but sort of fact of life
Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.
Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.
Damn it yes! Stop using absolute font sizes - use RELATIVE font sizes - lame web designers.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
http://apple.slashdot.org/
too spaecial...
Funny. I can tell a clueless webSurfer from a clueful web surfer. If they're using lynx or some other Luddite throw-back of a browser, then the web surfer is a geeked-out loser who really really needs to find something else to care about. If not, you have someone who has something else to do with their time other than yammering on about something no one with a life cares about in the slightest.
Pop-ups, ads, and flash are not much of a problem for me, since I use filtering software to block it (PopUpCop).
What really drives me permanently away are sites that refuse to function unless cookies are enabled. This really burns my ass.
If I don't have an account on the offending site, what the hell is so hard about generating a temporary session ID, and tracking my position on their site using their own friggin' database? The fact that they don't do so leads me to believe that the site designers are either very stupid, or they're tracking more than just my position on their site.
If a site refuses to function, complaining that I don't have cookies enabled, I leave that site and never come back. There's no excuse for it.
Believe it or not, people who have jobs(you know, those people you hate and can't join) sometimes have reasons for not wanting dummies like yourself bookmarking into the site. Hmm. They may even have a viable business reason, such as not letting a competitor link into their site without going through the caveats and agreements necessary to reach that page. For example, on a medical page, its quite possible they want you to acknowledge that using their website does NOT constitute actual medical advice, and that you should seek a doctor's professional opinion if you are having issues.
Bah. What do I know anyway. I'm one of those clueless idiots with a job. Not a webmaster, but almost as bad, given I'm employed.
That's one of my ultimate annoyance. You fill out a form, something goes wrong, and you have to click "back" (which reloads the page) and fill everything out.
Much preferred is Click " onClick="history.back(); return false;">here to go back.
You get the best of both worlds. If JS is on... the user goes back to a nice friendly form with most data still there. If not, the user still has at least a working link.
Of course the best way is sometimes to repost the form with data filled in, and bad fields tagged for fixing... but for a one-click solution that's the easier.
Why do usernames in articles link to e-mail addresses? It makes no sense.
t'nera semordnilap
People gripe to me about that all the time, but I just point 'em to mozilla.org; fuck the morons that settle for Microsoft.
Am I the only one who disagrees with number 5? Why should a site turn it's layout into a virtual infomercial like that? Perhaps I'm the only one who believes in a little literacy among the users of the internet? If you have an attention span so short you need every important word bolded and italisized, and won't read anything longer than a bulleted list, it's possible that you should go back to watching TV.
It's been a long time.
Possibly the most annoying thing is an over zealous Flash intro created by someone who knows absolutely nothing about design and forgets to put a SKIP button somewhere on the page. *shiver* I HATE Flash.
Keep in mind that one of the greatest composers of all time, Mozart, kept the entire symphony in his head.
It's a lot less difficult to keep a site map in one's head than that, especially if it's organized well. While it is true that a good design requires a plan, it is not always true that it requires one written down, especially if the total number of types of pages is less than 10 - almost anybody can keep that much information in their head.
Just as with software engineering, sometimes the product itself offers inherent design methodology. For example, in C++, you specify what everything is going to do in header files before you write your code (or you do it that way if you are smart and actually plan BEFORE making the apps). You might even make it doxygen friendly and produce documentation on the various parts before you write it. Similarly, Zope offers the chance to make the site heirarchial if you design it correctly so that its easy to navigate.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
11. Cannot handle The Slashdot Effect.
Users sometimes (depending on the content, frequently) want to print your page and read it offline (directions, long articles, etc). Make it simple by either test-printing your page or by providing a printer-friendly version of the page.
--- Surfing the web on my ZX-81.
Why don't you all complain to Microsoft to fix this "feature", instead of trying to get the entire world to work around yet another M$ peculiarity ?
Also, what Nielsen missed is that "normal" people do not care what URLs are as long as they can be transmitted correctly. The masses have long given up on trying to figure out what the URL means. Otherwise, nobody would be using Amazon or Ebay today if it was that the URLs are hard to read.
Plus I find it rather unlikely that someone will try to verbally give you a cool URL as anything other than just the domain name. More likely even they will say "google for this and you'll find it".
Unless you like ugly logos. I still have a business from the guys at the link. It is much worse that the logo, as hard is that is to imagine.
No sense of perspective whatsoever.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
And my auto insurance company should alert me before I'm going to have a fender bender...
/. effect, then it could be viral marketing or a citation by a popular columnist that could take them out next. Presumably their referrer logs will tell where the wave is coming from, but the point may be moot at that point if they aren't prepared for being wildly successful.
Business/professional sites should be prepared ahead of time for such surges, if they are on the web to reach as wide an audience as possible. If it's not the
I just ran across this annoyance today. The website insists you allow cookies (by default, I don't), and redirections you to a NONEXISTENT error page when you don't allow cookies. Try it yourself, turn off cookies and go to law.com
-- Will program for bandwidth
One of the biggest usability lessons is always that it's not what users SAY they like that matters; it's what actually works.
Ask almost anyone and they'll say they prefer the pretty site -- but watch them, and you'll find they actually have a more successful experience with the boring-but-usable one, and the prettiness won't be what brings people to come back or to recommend it to their friends.
Also, pretty is easy; good functional design is hard. Be good at the hard stuff; everyone else will manage the pretty just as well as you can.
Get this. Last week I was visiting some site dedicated to the Cable TV industry (I don't remember which). I wanted to comment on an article published on the site. I could forgive them the lack of a discussion forum. When I went to the Contact info page, there were no telephone numbers or physical addresses, just email addrs. Email was fine for my immediate need. But...
The Contact Info page was a PICTURE!
The email addresses were not mail-to, and because it was an image, I couldn't select the text of the address to paste into my mail client. I have never encountered a web site that so hostile to its customers.
What really ticks me off is the sites which sniff for NEtscape 6+, but don't include Mozilla, Chimera, Phoenix, or any of the other Gecko-based browsers.
Fear not; the fix is trivial. Rather than sniffing for Netscape, sniff for Gecko instead. All Gecko-based browsers, by convention, have "Gecko" plud a number indicating the Gecko version in their User-Agent string. Use this, and you'll catch all Gecko-based browsers, which, since they all use the same rendering engine, will all work correctly unless you're doing something really esoteric, to the point where you'd already know it wouldn't work right.
Of course, ideally you shouldn't be coding to need UA sniffing at all. But if you must, then pleast, stop sniffing for Netscape and start sniffing for Gecko.
JS does not need to use that history -1... I HAVE A BACK BUTTON!
Sure, but those webmasteurs who like to use JavaScript for this have probably already put in an insta-redirect to break the back button. It's all part of user-hostile webdesign.
-e
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
It pisses me off when I have to enter a number, either a phone number or credit card number, in a specific format. Is it too hard to accept any of 8005551234, (800) 555-1234, (800)555 1234, or 800 555 1234? Or to simply remove spaces from my credit card number? Entering a nice, long string of digits with no spaces makes it a bitch when the website comes back with "Invalid credit card format", probably because my card has sequence "xxx xyyyy" and, not being able to use spaces, I entered xxxxxyyy by mistake.
You know what? Give me blocks of text anytime. The whole article on one page, please. Not spread out over ten pages so that I can get more advertisements forced on me. And please, no dumbed-down 'web writing' that is easily 'scanned' No matter what all those usability gurus say, I'm not interested in 'scanning' web pages, I want stuff that is interesting enough to actually read. And I have no problem at all with long blocks of text on the web if what I am reading is interesting to me.
And the problem with the "I need to write it all down" is that when you have small sites or sections that don't require collaboration, you're spending a significant portion of design time on something that isn't going to help you. Even if you get hit by a bus, someone else can figure out what you do with a small site.
This is quite applicable since most companies in the world are sole proprietorships. That means that there is a significant number of people who derive little benefit from site maps.
Larger sites with more than one designer are perhaps a different story, except, as I said, in the case that the web-app interface provides structure by its very nature.
Source code comments are not a replacement for good design and communication. Agreed. Programming language design has evolved, however, so that, for instance, UML or flowcharts are unnecessary for many languages. Structure is separated from implementation in many modern languages, such as C++ and Java.
I speak from experience here: having started out trying to keep structure in my head and working in C, I moved to keeping everything in the class definitions and working in C++. After passing 10,000 lines, it was still easy to keep track of everything in C++, but C was another story (since then all further C writing will be done with documented structure).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Which you will probably see more of as more and more companies get sick and tired of spam from email harvesters.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
When I find utterly annoying is when I spend 10 minutes filling a form, click enter and there is an error and now I have to retype all the form.
It happens way too often!
It is especially annoying when it is for job related purpose: I can't just swore and decide to ignore this website.
...and then just send you about 3 lines down the same page. Bastards. Come to think about it, all those intra-page links suck.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
e-commerce sites that ask me to "print a copy of this page" for a receipt. Yeah, that works really fscking well when I'm on my laptop in a hotel room somewhere, assholes.
where the problem is rather different -- there, there are only so many product names, for example, so trying to recognise typos for those product names might be a good thing.
Sayeth the great-grandparent:
As usual I expect all trolls to be bash me and tell me to use the standard. Well I don't care, no old people go to my site.
Sayeth the grandparent:
I'm 31 and have better than 20/20 eyes.
Sayeth the parent:
What does the first half of your sentence have to do with the second half? Are you trying to say that because you're 31 the rest of your comment (and prior comments) are more important? Do you want to brag about having good vision?
Sayeth me:
Read what he's replying to before you reply.
You are pumped up to a high-res and bitch about not being able to read small fonts? WTF is wrong with you people?
That's like cutting off your own leg with a hacksaw and then bitching about how your prosthetic limb doesn't quite cut it for olympic running.
If you didn't have something to complain about you might have to learn how to switch res with one keypress, nullifying your argument. You make me sick.
I agree but until there is a consesus not only on standards but on what works on multiple browsers you are forced to fall back on bad habits.
I have been trying to put together a master detail page that at least WORKS on both IE and Mozilla. Right now I'm stuck on scrollable tables:
- Use the TABLE tag or not?
- What exactly will enable scrollbars? (DIV, SPAN, IFRAME?)
- Where to put icons and who is going to handle them (CSS or Javascript)?
I just about exhausted my options to comply with standards and Im just in hack mode trying to make things work.
It's because they want you to get really excited about the product (or realize that you really, really need it) BEFORE getting turned off by the really high price.
They also want you to call them and talk to a salesperson. That's why it's so common in B2B -- B2B is much more likely to have large deals, so the salesperson wants to convince you of the inherent value of product and why you need a site-license before quoting the price. (Especially now when companies are more price-sensitive.)
Generally speaking, this isn't a good strategy for consumer products, though jewellery stores (and other luxury retailers) often go this route. You see it (but the price isn't visible), you like it, they have you try it on, you look at how great it looks on you, they tell you how stylish it is, what excellent quality the workmanship is and THEN you find out that it costs way too much. But by this point, you've decided that you really like it so it's easier to convince yourself that it's not THAT much more than you intended to spend... after all, it looks so nice and the workmanship is such excellent quality.... If the price was prominently displayed, you might just keep walking.
It may not be good for the user, but it's generally good sales strategy.
I can spell. I just can't type.
Episode title: "Interfection"
m e.com/AquaTeenHungerForce/season2. html#ep14
http://www.athf.com/guide.html
http://www.tvto
I can't help but wonder if Nielson was thinking of this episode with that cartoon of pop-up hell...
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
1) Too much color.
2) Broken links
3) Empty popups for collecting two clicks per
user for advertisers.
4) IE-only pages as corporate intranet
5) Wiki pages that anyone can delete (and has!)
6) Wiki pages that nobody could change since 1998
7) Menus that take you to the same information you already saw on the main page
8) Frames
9) Unidirectional links (auto-refresh!)
10) Input fields with one line of text for entering your problem report
-- Esa Pulkkinen
hey, what about, just plain, how easy is it to do what you want at that site?
E.g., a couple of months ago, I tried to rent a car online. To start with, all I wanted to know was, how much is it going to cost me for these dates? Could I do that easily? No. I tried 3 or 4 of the top names (I won't list them, I'm sure you can guess), and spent at least 10 mninutes on each site fighting my way through endless screens, where it seems you are allowed to enter one piece of information, then wait for the next page to come up etc. And on one site, I found several different ways of getting through to the end, each one with a different price! Eventually my wife got bored and after five minutes on the phone had the prices.
The key point being, every single damned extra click or pause hurts! Add the two together, and you've lost your customer.
(I could mention Use Cases here but I really don't want to start up that discussion - what? I did mention them? --ducks-- )
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing. Just because tiny (albeit well-rendered) fonts meet your needs doesn't mean that they will meet everyone's.
Me, I browse in Opera, which has a handy little zoom adjustment in the upper right corner of the window. Handy if type on a page is too small, or there is an object too large to fit on the screen. Most pages are comfortable for me to read, but every so often I'm glad that adjustment option is there.
~Idarubicin
How about the search engine gripe? I'm sorry, but until a search engine can accept "that place that the nice youg man down at the store was talking about yesterday", then it's going to be useless to the elderly. Perhaps some flexibility in forgiving spelling mistakes is desired (a la Google), but lack of it should not be considered a mistake.
The font-size gripe. Jakob, I know you're a klutz when it comes to Web design, and that you know jack about it, but please don't try to pass off your ignorance on others. Internet Explorer doesn't let you resize text set in pixels. Every other browser with a text resize function does. Thus, this is a problem with INTERNET EXPLORER, not with setting font-size in pixels, don't you think? Why not use some of the clout of Jakob Nielsen, world-famous usability guru, to get on Microsoft's ass about that and make them fix it?
"Blocks of Text" - Hmm. You see, Jakob, some people use their websites as places to showcase their writing. I know you have a hard time grasping this concept, but some of us are here for the fun of it. That means that sometimes you'll come across a page that's intended to be read, rather than skimmed over for a quick summary of the important points. My $0.02: if you've graduated high school and can't handle a long paragraph now and then, it's YOUR problem.
Long URLs - Well, if it weren't for the fact that virtually all "long" URLs are also URLs that no user on earth is ever going to need to manually type, I'd agree with this. But when I want to post a comment here on /., for example, I don't clear the address bar and type "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48804&cid=0&p id=0&startat=&threshold=2&mode=thread&commentsort= 0&op=Reply. Instead, I hit the "Reply" button (or link, as the case may be). Most "long" URLs are the result of variables being passed to scripts via GET, which means they were produced by a form. If you know anyone who'd rather try to manually fill form variables into the URL than just filling the form itself, let me know and I'll beat some sense into them.
Now I'm going to go do something silly to regain my sense of childlike innocence at the world. When I come back, Nielsen better be gone.
In as much as I [happily] feel I've designed my company's web site, since '97, to conform with all /.s peeves, I'm concerned about this 'cookie' issue. Of over a thousand page site, only our shopping cart (Interchange) requires Cookies. Am I exempt from all your hatred or is there something I am overlooking? ...My browsers are 'trained' to accept all cookies, but I certainly don't want to offend the potential buyer if they need a cookie to add an item to the cart. I'm not a programmer and getting MiniVend/Interchange to work tested what gray matter I have. Can I do a shopping cart without needing Cookies enabled?
I think this post is going to go in the wrong place. I've read /. for about two years, but this is my first post. Please don't be too hard on me!
Whenever I want to add a comment to something on a discussion board I don't want to register (including giving up my email) first. I just want to post the damn comment. This is the worst mistake in my book!
See here for Web design tips.
Pretty common mistake, but a cartoon is a comic that has motion --a moving picture. Take a look at Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" for a detailed explanation of the difference. Nice comics. I like the one about the credit card esp. Hey, where's the rest of the comic?
The Opera 7 betas have wonderful CSS support. That means IE, Moz, and Opera will all be relatively compatible - enough so that you can probably make the move to proper layout with CSS (heck, you could probably do it now; most of the bugs I know of in IE have to do with weird float behavior that doesn't happen too often). And if you really have encyclopedic knowledge of every single CSS 2 selector and property and use all of them in a single page (the only reason which would support the "doesn't support full spec" copout), then I applaud your gall and lament that you have no life.
No, this was the "Events" page. No disclaimer to click-through. There is no proprietary info on the page, just "Trade show" type stuff.
BTW, with any Serverside scripting language, it's very simple to prevent people from bookmarking to a page without going through a "disclaimer" page.
The webmaster wanted "flash" instead of "Functionality". Dumb dumb dumb.
Site maps are useful for some readers, search engines are useful for other readers, good well-designed links are best, good FAQs are useful for other readers. It's obvious that a good search engine is hard to implement, but if you make your pages easily searchable by Google, that's at least a start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
audible.com's web-site annoys the hell out of me - every link on the site is a java command, basically meaning you can't open a link in a new window - you're stuck on a linear surf-path. So what happens when you want to compare two products? You need to open another window and renavigate to what you're looking for from the front of the site.
Interestingly, the only part of the site that DOESN'T do this is the customer service portion? Why? Chances are because that part of the site is outsourced to a third-party customer service company. Smooth guys, real smooth.
Triv
Stupid ass music with no warning. When I have my computer cranked full blast listening to Aphrodite I sure as hell don't want some cheesy midi music coming through. Or worse yet, I've left my volume full blast but am in a quiet time and I hit a website with music.
These sites (planethalflife, planetquake...etc)seem to excel in cruddy web pages.
Long loading times, ads that are too resource intensive and links that are never updated or removed are some of the items that make these sites some of the worst on the net.
These pages are a good example of how not to make a site.
Save the World! Use a Quote!
My absolute pet gripe: sites that don't display the SIZE of a download beforehand, but make you fill in long questionnaires before you can find out how big the file is (2 MB, 20MB, 200MB?).
I HATE having to wade through pages of "fill in this form with 18 pages, wanting your address, what size is your organisation, are you an important person, yada, yada", just to find that the download file is absurdly large, designed for somebody with T1, and totally out of the question for anyone with dial-up (yes, in some countries dial-up is still QUITE COMMON).
Just recently I thought I was looking at a programmer's text editor - it turned out to be over 50 Meg in size. But I couldn't find this out until I began downloading - and I didn't have sufficient HOURS to spend just trying to get this software for testing.
It really is simple: on your download page - before you get them to wade through your 32 page questionnaire and registration form - just give a ballpark figure like this: Floogle 1.1.1 (53MB). Readers can instantly decide whether to go any further.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Flash
javascript for anything
Number three:
popups
Number four:
Cookies
Number five:
Let's not forget to list that spammer guy's info so the bots can pick it up. What's that guys info again?
The whole point of choosing "slashdot" as the name was to thwart verbal dictation of the site's url. Try saying it out loud once:
.. blah, screw it."
"Ech tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot oh arr gee."
"No, that's the word slash then the word dot, followed by a real dot then
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
IMHO, Sans serif fonts. Ironically, virtually all web useablity sites fall for this one.
Sans serif fonts are fine for headings, but difficult for body text. The *look* good at first glance - which is why these "web designers" use them, but when you actually sit down and read paragraphs of sans-serif, your eyes will ache and you might not know why.
(Okay, perhaps I'm ranting, but this is my personal experience. It's worse in print - I have a textbook in sans-serif, and it's murder to read!)
#1 web design mistake of all time:
Believing for even a second that Jakob Nielson is worth listening to.
No Prices... right on! That is the most frequent and annoying thing I've run into lately. Bullseye on that one.
Here are some things I thought were missing...
How about sound loops that don't stop by hitting the stop button? Or sound period! This is very annoying in an office enviornment where one might forget to turn off the speakers... such a thing can attract unwanted attention! I know that corporate sites don't seem to do this as much as geocities sites and such, but still, I think it worth mentioning.
Also, I think disabling the back button (from the 99 article) is still a nasty design mistake still overused today... it and pop-ups have gotten me into the habit of right-clicking on each link and opening it in its own window, so as not to corrupt any previous browsing, which leads to a slight annoyance of getting Javascript errors when there is some sort of script associated with the link... but I suppose that falls under #6, which by the way, doesn't emphasize enough the loathing that ppl have for pop-ups.
As for #2, I find that some sites don't seem to index their entire site for their search engine. At wizards.com (a particularly bad site in general), for instance, there are pages that I can't find using exact text from a page. I end up going to google to find the pages I'm looking for.
And finally... not having contact info on a site doesn't bother me too much... unless they also have inaccurate or insufficient whois data. I think keeping your whois data up to speed is a growing shortfall with modern discount hosts.
Speaking of Amex, what the heck is the woman illustrated in #7 wearing??
:) Is this a hidden insight into Nielson's mind?
Is she at work? What kind of work? What she got on underneath?
I guess I was the only one who just looks at the pictures.
A comment more on-topic: I like Nielson's points on what NOT to do; but his design edicts seem really dreary, such as the path at the top of the page, the dearth of color, the overly-large type, the drab layout....
Or, they're disabled and have to use a text-to-speech browser. Which functions kinda like lynx.
If they're using lynx, they could be web developers who are tsting their site for 508 compliance.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
It's because some idiot, like the guy doing Freenet just to pick on someone, is using text size in pixels. MSIE will allow you to resize text if it is specified in any size other than pixels. On my 1600x1200 monitor at work, the fonts are too small to read. On my 320x200 tablet PC beside my bed, they're too large.z
If you like the cartoons in the article, you can go read the strip that was written and drawn by the same pair, Doug Sheppard and Katrin L. Salyers, you can go to WaitingForBob.com. The strip is on hiatus right now, but you can go back to the beginning of the archives, and read "the story so far", including crossovers with UserFriendly, Goats and others.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
In Soviet Russia, your email address enters you!
Why this
function setopt(form,opt,i) {
eval('var opt = document.' + form + '.' + opt + '[' + i + '];');
opt.click();
}
and not this
function setopt(form, opt, i) {
document.forms[form].elements[opt][i].click();
}
?
Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn no other.
Jakob has already covered these things.
And offers some solutions.
Wow. I didn't know that. Mark me educated a little bit today. Seriously.
Flash is apparently a problem on the Web. Either he excluded it from the list intentionally, or he believes the use of Flash is going to improve radically soon enough, now that he works on it :). Either way, he is biased and doesn't disclose it.
Well good. My browsing improved a lot since I deleted the Flash plug-in. I still don't miss it.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
If I'm doing pages where I have side column text that is navigation oriented and the center is an article (which most have), I have the side text a fixed width font that is legible and the center text be something that is resizable
There is not ONE webmaster who would say "I have a side text in a font that is not legible"
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
somone should write a goatse.cx worm that installs a proxy so any site someone tries to goto it will just take them to goatse.cx
yo i'll email you when i icq again (finally)
your bro in lawrence
I miss talkin ta my bro in Lawrence. Betta install that ICQ shit soon.
-t
As for "why", I wish I could answer that. But the people writing the checks want it, and no matter how it's explained to them that it's pointless and stupid, they demand it.
A splash page, properly compressed, can come in at under 40k.
Assume that a "56K" v.90 connection actually connects at about 40 kbps on a typical telephone line. After taking 20 percent off the top for TCP/IP overhead, that's 32 kbps, or 4 KB per second.
I do NOT want to spend 10 seconds waiting for your interstitial to load.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I guess that when PT Barnum said (quoted?) there was a sucker born every minute, he was a pessimist. It's more like one a second.
There average three human babies born every second. Childhood mortality in some areas of the world reduces this to about two babies who live to see their twentieth birthday. Given that there is no correlation between childhood mortality and being a sucker, your estimation claims that half of all grown-ups are suckers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not offering the preferred language requested.
For all languages? If nobody at my company can read and write Portuguese, then you're not going to get a web site in Portuguese unless you contact me about doing the translation yourself.
All browsers request a preferred language.
Then what is a server supposed to send when the user agent has set preferred language to Navajo?
Will I retire or break 10K?
too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.
How would you fix this in a way acceptable to corporate attorneys? The copyright and trademark notices are in there for a reason.
character separation should use optional hyphens.
What's the HTML code for "optional hyphen"? And how can you make it handle words that are spelled differently when hyphenated or not, such as German <Zucker>, <Zuk-ker> = "sugar"?
Content Proprietarily Encoded
What free, patent-free video codec would you suggest?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nothing is a standard until it has at least two independent, interoperable implementations.
Agreed, even if I can't convince Twirlip of the Mists of this.
And it need to be agreed upon by a standards body.
Define "standards body". Many Slashdot trolls define "standards body" to exclude, say, the World Wide Web Consortium because unlike ISO, the W3C doesn't have statutory or regulatory support from any sovereign government.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you are underage or do not consent to viewing such material, please click here. [Walt Disney Company web site]
Why do so many erotic web sites link to the one entertainment company that had the most to do with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?
Will I retire or break 10K?
For example, on a medical page, its quite possible they want you to acknowledge that using their website does NOT constitute actual medical advice, and that you should seek a doctor's professional opinion if you are having issues.
What's wrong with placing something along the lines of "This is not medical advice nor legal advice. This document is provided under these disclaimers" at the top of the page? (Or was that just a bad example?)
If the operators of a web site really want to authenticate users who have read and agreed to a contract, they should set up nick/pass authentication and serve all pages with SSL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Incoming phone calls are WAY more expensive than page views or incoming email.
What about incoming instant messages?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The fee does not include a broadband connection, which is required to subscribe."
And then the banner at the top of the page points you directly to MSN Broadband at $50/mo, which is $28/mo more than MSN's dial-up offering. Add that to the $50/year ($4/mo) Xbox Live subscription, and you get a grand total of $32 per month, available only to select residents of the United States of America. It's not even available to 1. households where neither the cable monopoly nor the telephone monopoly provides high-speed access (cable company: "don't like it? move to a different town!"), or 2. households with at least one child under the age of 13 (COPPA threshold) who likes to play video games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ech tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot oh arr gee
Nowadays, when I tell a fellow who has had at least a couple months of web experience to "pull up a web browser and go to slash dot dadorg", 99% know what I'm talking about.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, CSS relative font sizing is the SOLUTION.
Then how does that solve for the fact that Mac monitors and Windows monitors are physically the same size, but Windows treats the monitor as 96dpi, whereas Mac OS treats the monitor as 72dpi? IE for Mac, Netscape 4 for Mac, and Netscape 4 for Linux will render "12pt" or "100%" text as 12px by default, whereas IE for Windows, Netscape for Windows, and all versions of Mozilla will render it at 16px.
Will I retire or break 10K?
what if the reason you want them to go back a page is because they forgot a field in a form?
My experience with HTML forms in Microsoft Internet Explorer is that IE often forgets what the user has entered into a form even if the user did use the browser's back button.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The user got to your website, so it's reasonable to assume they're familiar with standard navigation.
Not my about-60 grandma. She has trouble comprehending even the most basic concept of the back button stack. She just types in the URL she gets from a government office. Heck, I have to re-explain what a "right click" is every day.
When you give directions to your place of business, do you feel the need to instruct someone how to drive?
No, because driving an automobile is more entrenched in American culture than using the Web.
A webpage should use standard, familiar methods of navigation.
Agreed. But a site operator still has to make a site idiot-proof.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages?
I read somewhere that the $CALL$ prices are not listed in the catalog because of a contract with the supplier of the goods: "Either you don't advertise a price under $999, or you don't get our goods at all."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing.
Or maybe the operating system that came bundled with his computer assumes a resolution of 72 virtual dpi, even if his monitor actually runs at 96 dpi, and offers no way to change it except to magnify the whole screen to 48 real dpi by doubling the pixels.
Such a system exists and is called Mac OS Classic. (I don't know whether or not Mac OS X has solved this by letting the user change the system resolution.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's a matter or WHO you host with.
Let's see... $10/mo, $10/mo, $10/mo, Slashdot finds me $1000/mo, $10/mo, $10/mo...
Will I retire or break 10K?
or he believes the use of Flash is going to improve radically soon enough
Flash 6 aka Flash MX has introduced new features that greatly improve usability when used as directed. I don't have Flash because I can't afford it, but I'd expect that Nielsen has written a chapter in the Flash 6 manual about usability techniques. Expect Nielsen to rant against abuse of the Flash product once Flash 6 content becomes more widespread.
Don't consider it as bias. Consider it as preaching not to the choir but to those who have the power to change things, that is, Flash content developers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
but a cartoon is a comic that has motion --a moving picture.
Definitions 1, 2, and 4 from "cartoon" in the American Heritage(R) dictionary refer to still cartoons. Definition 3 refers to "animated cartoons", which do have motion. "Political cartoons" most often do not. "Cartoonists" aren't always animators. Heck, even some of the material on the AOL Cartoon Network moves with such a low frame rate that it might as well almost be individual panels.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
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