Making web pages, we often focus on its appearance. We may forget we also need to pay attention to its usability and accessibility. Beside the common mistakes that we will make such as using table, we may not know that some other techniques we use in our website are also web design mistakes.
The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005
1. Legibility Problems
Many people complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; also many people complained about low contrast between text and background.
2. Non-Standard Links
Following are the five main guidelines for links:
- Make obvious what's clickable: for text links, use colored, underlined text (and don't underline non-link text).
- Differentiate visited and unvisited links.
- Explain what users will find at the other end of the link, and include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO). Don't use "click here" or other non-descriptive link text.
- Avoid JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links.
- In particular, don't open pages in new windows (except for PDF files and such).
Links are the Web's number one interaction element. Violating common expectations for how links work is a sure way to confuse and delay users, and might prevent them from being able to use your site.
3. Flash
Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won't recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.
Flash is a programming environment and should be used to offer users additional power and features that are unavailable from a static page. Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don't make your pages move. It doesn't increase users' attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.
Using Flash for navigation is almost as bad. People prefer predictable navigation and static menus.
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
Writing for the Web means making content
- short,
- scannable, and
- to the point (rather than full of fluffy marketese).
Web content should also
- answer users' questions and
- use common language rather than made-up terms (this also improves search engine visibility, since users search using their own words, not yours).
5. Bad Search
Everything else on this list is pretty easy to get right, but unfortunately fixing search requires considerable work and an investment in better software. It's worth doing, though, because search is a fundamental component of the Web user experience and is getting more important every year.
6. Browser Incompatibility
In 2004, almost everybody used Internet Explorer and the business case for supporting other browsers was getting pretty tough to defend on an ROI basis.
Today, however, enough people use Firefox (and various other minority browsers, like Opera and Safari) that the business case is back: don't turn away customers just because they prefer a different platform.
7. Cumbersome Forms
People complained about numerous form-related problems. The basic issue? Forms are used too often on the Web and tend to be too big, featuring too many unnecessary questions and options. In the long run, we need more of an applications metaphor for Internet interaction design. For now, users are confronted by numerous forms and we must make each encounter as smooth as possible. There are five basic guidelines to this end:
- Cut any questions that are not needed. For example, do you really need a salutation (Mr/Ms/Mrs/Miss/etc.)?
- Don't make fields mandatory unless they truly are.
- Support autofill to the max by avoiding unusual field labels (just use Name, Address, etc.).
- Set the keyboard focus to the first field when the form is displayed. This saves a click.
- Allow flexible input of phone numbers, credit card numbers, and the like. It's easy to have the computer eliminate characters like parentheses and extra spaces. This is particularly important for elderly users, who tend to suffer when sites require data entry in unfamiliar formats. Why lose orders because a user prefers to enter a credit card number in nicely chunked, four-digit groups rather than an undifferentiated, error-prone blob of sixteen digits?
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
Even though phone numbers and email addresses are the most requested forms of contact info, having a physical mailing address on the site might be more important because it's one of the key credibility markers. A company with no address is not one you want to give money to.
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
Complaints here fell into two categories:
- On big monitors, websites are difficult to use if they don't resize with the window. Conversely, if users have a small window and a page doesn't use a liquid layout, it triggers insufferable horizontal scrolling.
- The rightmost part of a page is cut off when printing a frozen page. This is especially true for Europeans, who use narrower paper (A4) than Americans.
The very worst offenders are sites that freeze both the width and height of the viewport when displaying information in a pop-up window. Pop-ups are a mistake in their own right. If you must use them, don't force users to read in a tiny peephole. At an absolute minimum, let users resize any new windows.
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement
The worst mistake is when a user clicks the "enlarge photo" button and the site simply displays the same photo. It's always a mistake to offer no-ops that do nothing when clicked. Such do-nothing links and buttons add clutter, waste time, and increase user confusion: What happened? Did I do something wrong?
Another mistake here that's almost as bad is when sites let users enlarge photos, but only by a fraction. When users ask for a big photo, show them a big photo. It's often best to offer an enlargement that fills up the most common screen size used by your customers (1024x768 for B2C sites, at the time of this writing). Other times, this is insufficient, and it's better to offer a range of close-ups to give users the details they need without requiring them to scroll a too-large photo.
