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10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of | How-To | Sma...

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  • ucdesign

    User-Centred Design

    24 members,39 bookmarks

    User-Centred Design and related disciplines and topics of interest. Add link to articles, blogs, research, papers, books, videos, organisations etc - anything you like :) Please tag at least the discipline, and technique.

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Saved by 22 people (6 private), first by anonymouse user on 2007-09-27


Public Sticky notes

“the shiny surface wins awards, real substance wins customers”

Highlighted by blpgirl

Nevermind what design you have, and nevermind which functionality you have to offer — if your visitors don’t understand how they can get from point A to point B they won’t use your site.

Highlighted by blpgirl

In almost every professional design (except from special design showcases such as, e.g., portfolios) you need to offer your visitors

  • a clear, self-explanatory navigation,
  • precise text-presentation,
  • search functionality and
  • visible and thought-out site structure.

Highlighted by blpgirl

Hidden log-in link.

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Pop-ups for content presentation.

Highlighted by blpgirl

Almost every modern web browser uses a popup-blocker to prevent pop-ups, ad blocks and further site content recognized as advertisement. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer make use of it — therefore the idea to use pop-ups to present the main content isn’t probably the most reasonable idea web-designer might come up with.

Highlighted by blpgirl

Invisible links.

Visitors have to know where they are, where they’ve been and where they can go next. If designers don’t present this information in an appropriate way, visitors can have serious problems with site navigation.

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Visual noise.

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Content blocks layering upon each other.

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You don’t use pop-ups.
Pop-ups interrupt the browsing session of the visitors and require an instant feedback. Respect your visitors.

Highlighted by blpgirl

You don’t change users’ window size.
The same argument as the one against pop-ups holds. Some browsers, e.g. Internet Explorer, saves the browser dimensions and uses them for further browser sessions.

Highlighted by blpgirl

You don’t use too small font sizes.
Long passages are harder to read, and to read brief sentences readers need more time. It holds also for links, buttons, forms, search boxes and other elements. Good news — in Web 2.0 the opposite is the case.

Highlighted by blpgirl

You don’t have unclear link text.
Links have to be precise and lead to the destination they describe. Ambiguous link descriptions should be avoided.

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You make it easy to contact you.

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Your links open in the same window.
Visitors want to have control over everything what happens in their browser. If they’d like to open a link in a new window they will. If they don’t want to, they won’t. If your links open in a new window you make the decision which is not your decision to make.

Highlighted by blpgirl