Commentary on the original top 10 usability mistakes in web desing - epilogue

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):

1. Using frames: important - I don't know who in their right mind would think of using frames any more, just don't do it!
   
2. 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
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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!
   
7. 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?
   
8. 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?
   
9. Outdated information: important- if your users cannot trust that information on your site is still valid and up to date, how can they trust anything that is there?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.
   
10. 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:

1. Overly long download times
2. Lack of navigation support
3. Non-standard link colors
4. Outdated information 
5. Using frames
6. Scrolling text, marquees and constantly running animation
7. Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology
8. Long scrolling page
9. Complex URLs
10. Orphan page

Commentary on the original top 10 usability mistakes in web design - is usability spot usable?

Now that we have looked through the original top 10 usability mistakes in web design by Jakob Nielsen (1996) it is yet again time to see how this usability blog would do when evaluated against these original web usability mistakes, seasoned with some explanations and commentary:

1. Using frames: Nope, no frames used here. And if Blogger used frames, I wouldn't be here in the first place.
   
2. Gratuitous use of bleeding-edge technology: Nope, nothing here could be considered to be very much of bleeding-edge technology. No Flash based menus or chat-boxes or Twitter feeds.
   
3. Scrolling text, marquees and constantly running animations: No scrolling texts or marquees or elaborate animations that would make you feel like being in 90s disco.
   
4. Complex URLs: No way. As mentioned in the commentary, Blogger is almost (but not quite) exemplary for having URLs that us mere humans can actually decipher.
   
5. Orphan pages: Not a chance. There are navigational aids (chronological menus, tag search and normal search) and the blog banner links back to index page... except when you already are at index page when there is no link, which is a bit surprising.
   
6. Long scrolling pages: No horizontal scrolling necessary. Pages listing many recent posts can get quite long and require vertical scrolling, but that shouldn't be that big of a problem any more, especially with all the aforementioned navigational aids.
   
7. Lack of navigation support: Not a problem here. All those previously mentioned navigational aids provide good support for navigation.
   
8. Non-standard link colors: Links look like links and they have standard and distinct color, but visited links don't seem to change their colors. So bit of a problem here and I have to see if I can do something about it.
   
9. Outdated information: No outdated information here since this blog is relatively new and since blog posts are not usually meant to be modified after they are posted.
   
10. Overly long download times: Shouldn't be a problem here, since there are not many or big pictures, Flash, Java or Shockwave applets. Your mileage may vary if you have dial-up connection.
    

Overall, Usability Spot seems to do quite well when compared to the original list of usability mistakes in web design, which of course is not saying much. When it is time to do a commentary on more recent top 10 web usability mistake lists, things might change a bit but hopefully not very much.:

Commentary on the original top 10 usability mistakes in web design - overly long download times

The tenth and last (but not the least!) usability mistake in the list of original top 10 usability mistakes in web design by Jakob Nielsen (1996) is overly long download times. Users start losing their interest and patience quite fast when they have to wait more than 10-15 seconds for any reason. Back in good old 90s most internet connections were slow dial-up connections so loading a very big and elaborate web page might take so long that you could make a cup of coffee (and maybe drink it) before loading was finished.

Nowadays connections are usually broadband connections and getting faster almost every year, so one might be tempted to think that this particular usability mistake is not valid any more. Wrong! While connections get faster, also the web pages get bigger, more elaborate and full of all sorts of Flash, Java and Shockwave applets, widgets and kludges that have to be started and loaded. It is unfortunately common having to wait, twiddle thumbs and watch until the progress bar fills up or percentage reaches 100% and site that is entirely Flash-based is loaded. And that can take sometimes even longer than 10-15 seconds. So make sure that your website is not bloated (i.e. not too many pictures in one page), and doesn't have applets that take forever to load and force the users to stop browsing and wait until loading is finished. Even if your content is par excellence, your users don't want to wait for long and might go elsewhere.