The Top 3 Web Design Mistakes of 2005
The usability guru Jakob Nielsen comes out with a list of 10 web design mistakes every couple of years. Here's the top 3 for this year (2005):
1. Legibility Problems
Most complaints were about small font sizes or frozen font sizes (which you cannot alter using a browser's Text Size command). This one really surprised me, and it prompted me to start making websites with bigger fonts. With the baby boomers getting older, it's only going to get worse.
2. Non-Standard Links
This is broken down into 5 sections:
- Non-obviously clickable links (not underlined)
- No differentiation between visited and unvisited links
- No explanation of where the link leads to (a typical example is click here)
- JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links
- Opening pages in new windows (but Jakob says that's OK for PDF files and such)
3. Flash
Jakob says that
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 are 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.
That fits in well with my philosophy and the reason I called my company no diamonds, meaning not flashy.
