Top 10 Website Usability Mistakes
Legibility problems
Bad fonts won the vote by a landslide, getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake. About two thirds of the voters complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; about one third complained about low contrast between text and background.
Links are the web number one interaction element. Violating common expectations for how links work is a surefire way of confusing and delaying users, and may prevent them from being able to use your site. Here are the five main guidelines for how links are supposed to work:
• Make obvious what’s clickable. For text links, use coloured, 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 optimisation (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).
Flash
Even though Flash can be used to good effect, 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’re 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 shouldn’t be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a photographer to shoot better photos. Don’t make your pages move. Movement doesn’t increase users attention, it drives them away. Most people equate animated content with useless content, and using Flash for navigation is almost as bad. People prefer predictable navigation and static menus.
Content 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).
Bad search
Everything else on this list is fairly 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 becoming more important every year.
Browser incompatibility
I admit it: at my seminars in 2004, I had downgraded cross-platform compatibility to a minor guideline (that is, “worth thinking about if you have extra project time, but not a priority”). At that time, 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, Opera and Safari that the business case is back. Don’t turn customers away simply because they prefer a different platform.
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. 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. 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.
No contact information
Even though phone numbers and email addresses are the most requested forms of contact info, having a physical mailing address on the site may be more important because it’s one of the key credibility markers. A company with no address isn’t one you want to give money to.
Frozen layouts with fixed 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 past of a page is cut off when printing a frozen page. Font sizes are a related issue. Assuming a site doesn’t commit mistake #1 and freeze the fonts, users with high-resolution monitors often bump up the font size. However, if they also want to bump up the window size to make the bigger text more readable, a frozen layout thwarts their efforts.
Pop-ups
Pop-up windows are evil. Enough said. Except that I should add that pop-ups scored as the number one most hated advertising technique in a separate survey of what users feel about online ads.
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