Top Ten Design Mistakes of 2005 Summary
I thought it was very interesting how this particular article started out. Neilsen reports that despite surveying a different crowd for the 2005 top ten most annoying web design problems, the answers stayed exactly the same from the last survey conducted. Obviously these are problems that have permeated the web and still require a lot of attention. As I read through the list I found myself nodding along for the most part, thinking to myself, “that is definitely annoying.” However, I learned a lot from this alertbox and found a great deal of information I intend to review as I build my own website. So, here we go, the list of top ten design mistakes for 2005.
First in line are legibility issues. This includes hard-to-read fonts, fonts that are too small, and fonts that don’t contrast with the background enough. Second came non-standard links. Problems reported here were things that look like links but aren’t, links that don’t change after you visit and links that open new windows (excluding pdf documents.) Third place went to poor uses of flash that don’t function and only aggravate and annoy. Fourth place went to web copy that is not written well for web, being too long, too convoluted or too broad. And fifth place is poor search tools (the only one on the list that actually takes extensive time and potentially money to solve.)
The final five list items began with browser incompatibility, which is becoming even more of an issue as popularity grows for browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Operah. Cumbersome forms took the seventh place, with their long lists of questions extensive mandatory fields, and inflexible input. The eighth list item was limited contact information on the part of the website owners. The ninth item was frozen pages and fixed page widths, which make it harder to print a page and impossible to resize for higher resolution screens. And the final item on the list was (drum roll!!!) Pictures that do not enlarge, especially on ecommerce sites or offer an enlargement that is really not much bigger than the original picture.
Neilsen ends his article by saying that people are not really interested in NEW technologies, they just want the information and the basic quality improvements. Interesting, I must say, but not really surprising. I plan on using the information by keeping it close at hand and reviewing it as I move deeper into web development.
To read this article visit alertbox.
March 31, 2008 12:07 PM