Commentary on the
original top 10 usability mistakes in web design by Jakob Nielsen (1996) is now coming to an end and it is yet again time to give my own personal opinions on these usability mistakes, which mistakes are still valid and you must avoid making (
important), which mistakes are not as critical or relevant any more but go against good usability practice (
recommended) and which are not relevant any more so you can ignore them from usability point of view (
ignore):
- Using frames: important - I don't know who in their right mind would think of using frames any more, just don't do it!
- Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology: recommended - maybe not as big of a problem any more, but it is good usability practice to use bleeding-edge technology only where it provides some additional value to the user
- Scrolling text, marquees and constantly running animations: important - these are just plain evil in wrong hands and there are not that many legitimate reasons for using them.
- Complex URLs: recommended - as there are now (hopefully) many navigational aids available for users to understand the website structure, URLs play smaller part but it is good practice to keep them as simple and easy to understand as possible. Unless you have dynamic web content, in which case your URLs will most likely be incomprehensible mess anyway.
- Orphan pages: recommended - again, as there are now many navigational aids available (provided that they are used at the particular site!) orphan pages shouldn't appear any more if web designers know what they are doing.
- Long scrolling pages: recommended - vertical scrolling has become part of our everyday life in the web, so it is not that big of a problem. Of course putting a whole novel on one web page gets very tedious very fast, and horizontal scrolling should be avoided at all costs!
- Lack of navigation support: important - if you don't give your users any clues how they can navigate your website, how can you expect them to find anything?
- Non-standard link colors: important - if the links doesn't look like links, how do you expect users to find them? By playing hide-and-seek?
- Outdated information: important- if your users cannot trust that information on your site is still valid and up to date, how can they trust anything that is there? Users must always be able to trust that the critical data such as prices, contact information, legal information etc. are not outdated.
- Overly long download times: important - connections speeds may get faster all the time, but so does the amount of stuff you can put on the website. And don't assume that since you have gigabit broadband, everybody has.
As we can see, every one of these original usability mistakes is still in one way or another relevant today. The interpretation and reasoning behind individual mistake might have changed, but these are still the mistakes we still have to see almost every day when browsing the web. No top 5 list this time since I really couldn't exclude any of the mistakes with clear conscience, so here is the top 10 list arranged as I see their order of importance today:
- Overly long download times
- Lack of navigation support
- Non-standard link colors
- Outdated information
- Using frames
- Scrolling text, marquees and constantly running animation
- Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology
- Long scrolling page
- Complex URLs
- Orphan page
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