Alertbox - Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design
In this Alertbox article, Doctor Jakob Nielson published his 10 Top Mistakes in Web Design for the year 2007. Starting from number one, they are:
1. Bad Search Engines – a number of search engines are much too literal for their users to handle. They can’t understand variants of the search terms as well as misspellings of said terms. This makes using them especially difficult for elderly users. Also, results are often prioritized incorrectly, making it sometimes difficult for users to find what they want.
2. PDF Files for Online Reading – PDF files are much too bulky for reading online; they often take too long to load and are incorrectly sized for the user’s window. They should be used for downloadable and printable versions of materials, not the primary reading format.
3. Non-Color Changing Links – Links that don’t change color upon being clicked are severe problem for users, especially those among the elderly; they can’t tell what pages they’ve already visited.
4. Non-Scannable Text – This type of text is incredibly boring for the user to read, breaks in texts make it much easy for them to read.
5. Fixed Font Size – CSS users often disable the ‘Change Font Size’ option of a browser, keeping some users from being able to increase font size to read text.
6. Bad Page Titles – Badly titled web pages are unable to be easily found on search engines.
7. Advertisement-esqe Design – Web users often ignore ads that get in the way of their navigation, therefore, pages that are designed in a manner reminiscent of ads are often skipped and ignored.
8. Design Violations – Web sites that are different from the designed norm are often avoided by users, as they tend to confuse them.
9. New Browser Windows – The tendency of some sites to open up new windows for every link is irritating to users and can often seem like pop-up ads to many navigators. Also, users like to be able to use the Back Button, multiple windows prevents that from being possible.
10. Not Answering User’s Questions – Some web sites don’t provide the users the necessary information to answer questions they might have; this is often a problem with product-driven websites.
These are the most common mistakes of web designers on the internet today. Fortunately, I already avoid most of them, but I intend to do so even more strictly in the future.