Top 10 Web Design Mistakes
From Jakob Nielsen, UseIt.com:
“The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be. Since my first attempt in 1996, I have compiled many top-10 lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design. See links to all these lists at the bottom of this article. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of Web design.”
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes - Updated for 2007
- Bad search
- PDF files for online reading
- Not changing the color of visited links
- Non-scannable text
- Fixed font size
- Page titles with low search engine visibility
- Anything that looks like an advertisement
- Violating design conventions
- Opening new browser windows
- Not answering users’ question
Jakob Nielsen has been called “the guru of Web page usability” (The New York Times).
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.
Dr. Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.