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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.
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
Getting your site linked to on the front page of /.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
My vote is for Amazon. Renders perfectly in any browser I have tried.
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
How about search engines that ignore words of 3 characters or less? ;)
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."
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?
(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...
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.
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!
I agree. On the rare occassion I register to get to the site, I use an email address generated on the fly that will tell me at a glance where the address came from. Of course, it's extremely rare that I will go through the bother of registering.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Jeez! You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages? :-)
As for Veritas... I suspect the reason that they have no prices is that they'd just put you off wanting to use their software. Plus they probably will be flexible in the pricing anyway if they think that they could negotiate a little bit to get you to sign the license agreement. (Just watch out when they decide that the discount you originally got will no longer be available when it's time to renew the support agreement. And, of course, they've got you by the short hairs as it would be pretty disruptive to switch backup software.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
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.
Amen, brother.
This is my biggest complaint of web sites. The problem is mostly due to clueless web designers using broken off-the-shelf email validation tools.
One option is to use Qmail instead of Sendmail as your MTA. Qmail uses "-" (dash, minus sign) as a seperator and that is almost universally accepted by web sites.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Well, that tells you who decided that that there should even be a FAQ page: the marketing folks.
A technical FAQ would probably derive the company of the profit associated with you calling them for support and, if written well enough, eliminate the need for a support or maintenance contract altogether.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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
It's time for people to start moving away from tables to CSS and from .gif to .png.
No, it isn't. The browsers are not compatible with one another when it comes to CSS, and neither of them implement the full spec. Sometimes IE renders PNG, sometimes it doesn't. Until I can be sure that 99% of the people who come to my site see what I intend them to see, I'm sticking with tables, jpegs, and gifs.
Thomas Galvin
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?
There are numerous tools available out there for tracking error responses from the web server access logs,
Your server access logs aren't of much use if you're linking to something not on your server, and the link becomes invalid. linkcheck can help with this, but you have to actually give a damn to use that.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
PNG in 8-bit mode, with single bit transparency, works in all browsers. That's everything gif does (except animation which is available in .mng).
Perhaps it's a problem with GIMP, then; last time I displayed a transparent PNG in IE, the transparent color was drawn as light grey.
And, it's very possible to make a CSS site that works in IE5+, Mozilla and Opera 6+. Sure, you have to code around quirks in IE and Opera, but it can be done.
It can be done, but I am not going to waste my time doing it. I spend enough of my time trying to work around the quirks in C++. I don't want to have to maintain two different stylesheets, or two branches of javascript, just to do something that I can do with a nested table. Tables are well-supported, well-understood, and consistant. When I've got time on the weekend, I'll play around with CSS positioning, et al, but when I'm realeasing something for general consumption, it is going to be something that I know, and that I know will work.
Thomas Galvin
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
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.
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.
Oracle does this shit too, just to read their documentation. They also make you register, which also pisses me off. Register so we can send you spam. Not only do they make you register, but then they cookie you to death, with each of their domains setting cookie after cookie, just to read a fucking docuement. That is enough for me to pick mysql or sybase over oracle any day.
Only 'flamers' flame!
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.
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!
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
(The sites that I see this are usually high-end musical instruments. It makes me laugh-- there's a QUANTITY next to it: Yes, I'd like 10 baritone saxophones shipped to my door, please, at $6,000 a piece.)
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
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
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."
Part of the problem with this is designer's environment - they've all got excellent monitors and great eyesight. Arial 8pt looks fine and is all hip when you're used to that sort of thing.
Stick 'em on a crappy laptop and give them the slight nearsightedness the rest of us have, suddenly I think everything would be at least 12-point again.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
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
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
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.
Or more likely, a web designer's obligation to bow to the wants of his client. Some can be educated, but you'll still have the owner who insists his page look exactly as his brochure does down to the exact same fonts and graphics.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
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?
It's unfortunate, but it's also part of life. It;s just a matter of perspective, and hindsight being 20/20, etc. Happy new year.
"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?
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?
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?