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.""

Comments

Numero Uno ...

[airrage]

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.

Re:Numero Uno ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Number two

Useless search facilities

Number three

A home page that is just a logo to click on to go to the real home page. It is often large, slow and adds nothing (good) to the experience

Number four

Flash

Number five

Image alt tags that start 'Click here to...' which is all you see when the image is small so you dont know where to click for what, without view source.

Number six

No pooftas! (Thats a Monty Python joke of humourless bastards - thought I'd get the counter attack in first)

Re:Numero Uno ...

[thomas.galvin]

Number three
A home page that is just a logo to click on to go to the real home page. It is often large, slow and adds nothing (good) to the experience
Number four
Flash

I used to feel the same way you do; actually, I still feel the same way you do. When I hit the net, it's usually because I am looking for something particular, and the more hoops/pluggins I have to jump through to get to it, the more unhappy I become.

When I talk to the people that use my site, on the other hand, I find that at least a good number of them like the "ooh, shiney" parts of the web. I've actually had people ask me to restore the flash intro that the guy who ran the site before me made.

I find that splash pages (the ones that link to the "real" hompage) act almost like the cover of a book. People process images much more uickly than they do written words, and a splash page allows you make a more reliable first impression than some other methods; and if you compress your images, there is no reason it should take more than a few seconds to load. A splash page, properly compressed, can come in at under 40k.

I think the hallmark of good design these days is to wrap functionality in a pretty package; make sure that your site is useful/useable, but also make it attractive enough that your users know you care about both your content and their experience.

They missed websites that are just unnavigable

[Mothra the III]

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?

Re:They missed websites that are just unnavigable

[sgage]

"A tactit commenly employed is to group products by the model name"

Yes indeed, quite annoying. Even more annoying to me is when you go to a site for information about a product, click on the "products" link, and are made to choose between "home", "small business", and "enterprise". I just want to see the products and their specs! Don't worry about why! Just tell me what you've got, and I'll make my own goddam decisions!

Sheesh.

- S

They missed one...

[misfit13b]

Too Much Flash Animation

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.

Re:They missed one...

[rnturn]

``For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide...''

Wouldn't it be nice if web designers stopped dictating the size you need to run your browser? One designer tells me I'm supposed to run my browser at 800x600, another at 1024x768, and another at some oddball resolution. (Which tells me one thing: they're using the browser at full screen and I'd bet that it's on a Windows box as well.) A pox on all who don't use the ``width=NN%'' option on tables.

Re:They missed one...

[JimDabell]

how about this... DONT MAKE IT FOR SPECIFIC PIXEL SIZES???

That had better not be aimed at me. The problems with the IE box model are there whether you use pixels or percentages, or anything else. I was merely commenting on the cause of the strange obsession with sites that are slightly too wide than what's probably intended.

if you specify a width... then you are a no talent HACK as a web-writer.

How about you go and get a little experience before going off on one? It's perfectly possible to produce fluid designs whilst specifying widths - you do know that you don't have to specify them in pixels, don't you?

Re:They missed one...

[leandrod]

Agreed, but I would go further. Flash should be banned until there are useable free software implementations running in other platforms than Intel. I use testing Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC and Flash simply isn't useable for me.

I would also add:

Wrong Character Codification: MS Win-specific character codes, contents inconsistent with HTML declaration.

Fixed Linesize Text, too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.

Bad Use of Hyphens: character separation should use optional hyphens.

Content Proprietarily Encoded: MS WMA & Office, Real, recent versions of Apple Quicktime.

Re:They missed one...

[_xeno_]

Stylesheets are nice for simple text styling, but can't even be depended on for font sizes! (Don't believe me? Set up a web page with a style

BODY { font-size: medium }

And see how it shows up on IE, IE for Mac, Netscape, and Netscape for Mac. They'll all be different sizes, last time I checked.)

Yeah, well, try these:

BODY { font-size: 14px; }

BODY { font-size: 12pt; }

I'll bet you'll find that those will display similarly on all browsers on all platforms. This of course assumes the same font, and that all the platforms have similar DPI settings. However, there are plenty of people who need the text to be larger than many sites provide (OK, Sprint?! 10px Verdana? *squint squint*) and get quite understandably annoyed when you've confined the text into a little bitty group of pixels.

If you want overly-anal control of the exact font size, you should be specifying it in pixels or, preferably, points. IE doesn't "magnify" fonts set with either, but Mozilla will magnify both. I consider both behaviors to be wrong, I think the Right Thing would be to scale up the points-to-pixels conversion as text is magnified, and leave things specified in pixels alone. Or, if pixel-sized font is scaled, then the "virtual pixel" to "real pixel" conversion should be scaled everywhere, including with <img>s.

Bottom line: "medium" is a browser-based setting. It's supposed to change from browser-to-browser (well, it should be expected to change - it doesn't have to). So complaining that the browsers don't have a uniform definition of "medium" when there isn't one is kind of silly.

Lack of pricing information (XBox Live site)

[davie]

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.

other mistakes

[dkone]

lack of real world contact info. sometimes a phone call is required.

Doug

Re:other mistakes

[micromoog]

This is not an oversight in most cases. Incoming phone calls are WAY more expensive than page views or incoming email.

Re:other mistakes

[AndroidCat]

Peeve: Companies that post jobs on their site, but don't provide a street address so you can figure out if it's possible to actually get there if you ever get an interview. I guess they want you to look up their domain registration in whois to prove your L337 skills.

My gripe

[Microsift]

Having to enter my email address twice.

Web Standards?

[JBMcB]

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!

Too many choices - too many standards

[bushboy]

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.

Last but not least...

[gUmbi]

11. Lack of line breaks

Jason.

No pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

(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 /. effect is always a problem. Hope nobody ever puts a link to *my* server up on /. my poor DSL line would be dead. :-P

Fixed text size? Only because M$ broke it

[metalhed77]

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.

My Worst One

[md81544]

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.

Re:My Worst One

[zomB1kenoB]

I agree about White on Black, which is why I prefer Gray or Blue on Black. It's the high contrast that makes the eyes bug. But I just can't look at a bright white screen very long before I start to feel my eyes starting to melt. I'm going blind right now, as I continue to stare at slashdot for hours on end.

Re:Javascript in links and Flash animation

[oZZoZZ]

I think flash is being used so much because of the filesize of the flash files. You can have an entire menu bar in flash that's about 1/4 the size of gif/jpeg. This is very useful for people paying per MB for bandwidth.

Re:Fornatted

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So, Nielsen thinks that we should write for semi-literate MTV-junkies with attention spans shorter than my dick? Fuck that; let's write for literate people.

a pet peeve

[mmcshane]

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.

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).

This Guy Just Needs a BETTER Browser

[Cokelee]

Fix These

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
Tell the damned user to look at their STATUS BAR.

Add These

FLASH Navigation
FRAMES
REALLY BIG ADVERTISEMENTS
POP UP/UNDER/SIDEWAYS/THROUGH/OVER/AROUND... ADS
INEFFECTIVE (read: STUPID) use of COOKIES

Re:Font Size

[Rhubarb Crumble]

Of course, the most annoying instance of this is went the fonts aren't actually text, but GIFs with text in them....

Re:/. almost fails the Number 9

[Reziac]

If you need to voice-quote some obnoxiously long URL, check out tinyurl.com -- it converts long URLs into short temporary URLs.

Frex, your post's http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48804&cid=4944 480 becomes http://tinyurl.com/3s1j

Re:Javascript in links and Flash animation

[Will_Malverson]

...there are many many positive uses for Javascript, such as history.go(-1).

WTF is wrong with letting the user hit the back button?

Previous entries

[91degrees]

It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here

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-pE C:www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:tgqi1bumb78 C:www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF -8

Why users hate horizontal scrolling

[Tim Macinta]

3. Horizontal Scrolling

Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it's much more common.

Or how about because horizontal scrolling forces you to scroll once for every line you read while vertical scrolling only forces you to scroll once for every page you want to read? So, there's generally more than an order of mangitude less scrolling required with vertical scrolling than with horizontal scrolling.

Re:/. almost fails the Number 9

[fermion]

I will jump to defend /. here. The essential URL for the article is 'http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/23/13924 3'. This is long but not complicated. It has no random sequence of characters. It is simple URL for anyone familiar with address conventions, and only slightly more complicated for the average user.

There is no way that this is an unusable URL.

Re:Javascript in links and Flash animation

[TheLink]

In my experience javascript has rarely been used positively.

It seems MUCH of javascript encourages CRAP web design. People are encouraged to do stupid things and then try to use javascript as a bandaid.

So many sites have javascript practically rewriting entire HTML pages.

Even history.go(-1) seems silly to me. Users aren't stupid - the back button is one of the first things they learn or are taught about when web browsing. Given all the various web technologies, can you give me a good reason why you would need history.go(-1), or any of the history stuff for that matter?

The other thing - you often can have javascript in the link, but still keep a usable href. I don't understand why so _many_ sites require javascript where a simple link will do. I hate this the most. Who cares about not having prices when the links don't even work? Or you can't even see anything on the first page.

Fortunately most sites that require Javascript (or Flash) for access are usually useless - filled with fluff or even lies.

Another thing, many sites that use javascript everywhere including forms appear to have been built by clueless idiots. There are often obvious web security problems with their sites. Easy SQL injection etc.

There are indeed good uses for Javascript, but sadly, excrement has been put to more good uses than Javascript.

How about denying access to pop-up add blockers?

[Zerbey]

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.

A polite slashdot?

[Peter_Pork]

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.

Re:/. almost fails the Number 9

[seann]

um
thats pretty cool dude.
you could almost post a front page slashdot story on it alone.

Re:Looooooong URLs

[JimDabell]

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).

This will also increase the chances of a cache hit, speeding up access to your site, reducing server load and bandwidth bills.

Don't invoke sessions unless absolutely needed.

Ditto. Nasty URLs can usually be made at least a little nicer with judicious use of mod_rewrite (so instead of something like http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1234&pid=5 678 turns into http://slashdot.org/stories/1234/comments/5678 (also a help for search engines, as well as humans)

Radio buttons and their dumbness

[Lord Bitman]

Not one place can you go where you need to click the small circle of a radio button rather than the option next to it. I'm sure somebody has noticed this. Not one place in any GUI anywhere must you click a status indicator rather than the option you wish to choose. Look around your desktop, look for radio buttons, and click next to them. Nobody ever does it any differently because it is the most convenient and logical way to make it work. Nobody except Every Page On The Net Anywhere.
And I think it's just plain stupid. People, please, do this:

function setopt(form,opt,i) {
eval('var opt = document.' + form + '.' + opt + '[' + i + '];');
opt.click();
}

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 /. would realize how stupid it is to have to click on some tiny thing next to their poll option, but maybe they havent noticed that the web is the only place they ever have to do that. Maybe they just dont use any other program with radio options. Maybe they never even open their browser's preference window. Come on, people! Am I missing something here? Just add ONE EXTRA ANCHOR around your option, and usability increases suddenly becomes much more comfortable.

Re:browser type

[DamnYouIAmALion]

Client-side scripting should check FUNCTIONALITY not BROWSER. You want to do a rollover? Check that the document.images collection exists.

That way, you don't care what browser is viewing your site.. you only do what you're allowed to do.

Of course, there are still annoying differences in the basic html rendering, etc. *sigh*

Adding to that idea...

[kcb93x]

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.