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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.""
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.
Forgetting to prepare server for /. effect
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.
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
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
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.
For the love of god man! Learn to use the
tag...
You have no spirit of adventure. Suppose that I hit a toaster manufacturer page looking for some technical data on a toaster. It is a very thrilling experience to click the "products" link and have to choose between "wooden products", "red&yellowish products", "other products", "products other than all of the above" and "guess where this link will take you". The products->toasters->specific model path is just boring when compared to that.
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.
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).
"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
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.
Thomas Galvin
-----
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...
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.
My wife works for a not-to-be-named textbook company. Their online companion to one of their books was getting incredibly poor remarks. She was in a group working on the problem, so she asked to see the site map. The answer from the web-design group was "site map? We don't have one." So she clarified that she was talking about a design site map. They didn't have one of those, either.
I wonder how many sites with no site map actually don't even have a design map? I would venture quite a few. Web design is similar to software enginerring: without a good plan, you're gonna get crap out of the process.
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.