Top ten web design mistakes
The following list from Jakob Nielsen (called an internet design guru in Canada’s Globe and Mail this morning) is timely considering the conversation regarding the new look IABC website. The complete story can be found at Nielen’s website - useit.com.
Legibility problems - bad fonts, small fonts, frozen fonts that cannot be enlarged, low contrast.
Odd links - non-obvious links, no differentiation between visited and unvisited links.
Flash - wrong on so many levels.
Content not written for the web - too long, too fluffy, not scannable.
Bad site search - not robust, not user friendly.
Browser incompatibility - needs to respond well to various browsers.
Cumbersome forms - essentials only, please.
No contact information - just too annoying for words (and a personal pet peeve).
Frozen layouts - pages should resize according to the users’ monitor settings.
Inadequate photo enlargement - let users do the enlarging if they want to.
Discuss.
October 17th, 2005 at 10:34 am
The learned Mr. Nielsen is not without his critics. One Web designer told me, “Nielsen thinks that the Google home page is the perfect design.” I find his material quite helpful — but I try to keep in mind that where one stands depends on where one sits. Good Web design isn’t always spare; many very useful sites have what Nielsen would call crowded pages.
Steve Crescenzo gives a fab talk on this subject — check him out.
October 17th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
How About Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement?
Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)
Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don’t study it in detail to find out what it is.
Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:
* banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page
* animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations
* pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).
Just a thought?
October 18th, 2005 at 8:45 am
As an experienced Web site builder and manager myself, I will add that I value Nielsen’s point of view more than that of any other single contributor to the art of making Web sites effective.
If he thinks Google’s design is effective, it’s because it IS effective for its purpose. He is the first to admit that few sites can be effective with such a sparse design because few sites are as focused.
Read his basics at useit.com for yourselves, and see what you think. Agree or not, you will learn something.
October 19th, 2005 at 6:38 am
Warren, do you know the resolution of your new computer, and the screen size?
And would you care to share this info?
Resolution is easy to find. Just right click on a blank part of the screen, go to properties and go to settings, and the numbers will be right in front of you.
One of the great challenges facing web designers today is the increasing resolution of monitors, making each letter on them smaller than on similar sized monitors with lower resolution.
I’ve talked with several people who’ve bought new 15.4 inch notebooks, paid extra for higher resolution screens, and only when the machine is delivered do they discover how tiny the type is.
The variety of screens you can buy today is a problem for web designers when picking photo sizes, too.
Sometimes browsers will shrink photos to fit and sometimes they won’t.
Big photos take longer to load, of course, but thumbnails speed this up a lot and still allow easy viewing of the photo just by clicking on it.
And then there’s the magic, int he Windows world, of F11. For those who have not tried this, just press the button and see what happens to the IABC Cafe.
BAK
October 20th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Further to Brian’s point, it has been known for a while that an astonishing percentage of users are not aware that their default text sizes (and other settings) *can* be changed, let alone how to do it. I have visited several client sites where the default settings were unbelievably un-usable. The good designer is aware of that.
October 22nd, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Hey Brian. I have absolutely no idea what the resolution is on my new laptop but it is one with the larger screen. Here’s the thing. I am one of the least technical people on the planet. All things electronic are simply supposed to work properly when I turn them on. When they do not, I have no idea what to do next - although I have learned to make sure said items are plugged in before I unleash all of my best expletives on them. Funny, the expletives never seem to have much of an effect.
November 1st, 2005 at 7:13 am
First, let me say that I have the utmost of respect for Jakob Neilsen.
To me, he is the voice of reason among the horde of web designers to whom text content is an inconvenience that must be accomodated for among their art directed images and clever, fancy-set, graphical-type headline and shrouded in light grey at 9pt over a white background with lots of negative space - so the design can “breathe”. Designs like this are completely ignorant of the fact that web pages are interfaces, and need to be designed for effective interaction.
And pretty websites is what you will get when the esthetic takes priority over function. This is where Neilsen does a great job of reminding us all of the mechanics how to do an effective job of function. But I don’t consider him the foremost expert on how to portray a brand online. To me it’s a separate discipline, but one that we should all be concerned with - as we are with the discipline of usability as we contemplate site design.
The challenge (and frustration even) that I have with some of this is that this whole thing often seems to be an either/or. If it’s functional, it’s ugly. If it’s pretty, it’s not easy to use. Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too?
Personally, I wouldn’t describe useit.com as a particularly compelling design, but I think he is trying to prove a point with its simplicity and it is a very usable design.
As for the principles mentioned, I have no complaint with any of them. They are all sound guidelines to follow. But just following a set of guidelines without having any other knowledge or experience in website architecture and design doesn’t guarantee perfect results. This applies to any pursuit that requires creativity, be that PR, communications, acting, music, human relationships or web design.
November 1st, 2005 at 7:19 am
Warren, I would guess your resolution is 1024 x 768. Mine is one of those 15.4″ screens with the resolution cranked up - the native resolution of my Dell being 1920 X 1200 pixels.
As an example, I can fit the IABC blog about 2.5 times across my screen.
And yes, that makes for some very small type but I do it so I can fit a lot of material on the screen at the same time as I find it aids in productivity.
(Although it’s not as hot these days with these contact lenses I’ve been wearing instead of my glasses.)