Jun
10
Visitors to your website don’t come just to look at your design and to figure out how to get all your fancy special effects to work. They come with questions they want answered. Your job is to make that information that they seek as easy to find as possible. Anything that stands in the way of your visitor finding out what they want to know quickly and simply makes your website a nightmare to use.
Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 Usability Nightmares you should be aware of with examples from real sites. There is also a list of 8 usability checkpoints:
- Don’t use pop-ups.
- Don’t change users’ window size.
- Don’t use too-small font sizes.
- Don’t have unclear link text.
- Don’t have dead links.
- Have at most one animation per page.
- Make it easy to contact you.
- Make links open in the same window.
Do you agree with the article? Do you know of any other usability nightmares that they missed?
10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of ~ Smashing Magazine
On a side note, comment #142 for this article was very amusing:
“I think that every designer should design for their grandma. If she can get around the site, only then can you pat yourself on the back. I have had customers that when I said click on the link, they actually picked up the mouse, put it on the screen and then clicked.”
Oh, dear.
Have Your Say
Do you have any questions or ideas?
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- Wednesday, January 7th, at 12:37pm
When I get my eZine up and running, I’ll be publishing it using ‘WordBurner’. I’ve always planned to use WordPress and Feedburner to manage my eZine, but wasn’t sure exactly how to do it. Luckily I happened upon a tutorial from Nettuts that explains how it’s done:
Build a ‘WordBurner’ Email Newsletter Manager using WordPress and FeedBurner - NETTUTS
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- Friday, December 19th, at 4:43pm
Negative headlines arouse curiosity
Here’s a great article about writing compelling headlines…
It’s the reason people love NASCAR and read National Enquirer.
We don’t want to admit it. We’re not supposed to feel that way. But secretly buried, deep down inside, we all want a front row seat to the wipe out of the season.
Read the whole story at copyblogger.com/train-wreck-blogging/
photo credit: hyperscholar
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- Thursday, December 18th, at 10:00pm
Did you know that you can post to your WP blog using an iPhone/iPod Touch? I’m doing exactly that using the WordPress app right now. Just need to set up my Press This bookmarklet in Safari and see if that works.
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- Wednesday, December 17th, at 9:02pm
404 Error page of Center'd!
Here are 60 Really Cool and Creative Error 404 Pages.
Just remember that your error page should be designed primarily to help your visitors get back on track as quickly as possible. Secondarily, being funny helps to take the sting of frustration out of getting lost on your site. Better to be helpful and not-so-funny than to just be amusing and not helpful.
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- Friday, June 13th, at 2:04am
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has written a great post about batch processing his blogging-related tasks. Doing similar tasks in batches is a great time-saving (and sanity-saving) technique for most activities in life, not just blogging. Darren goes into detail about how he does it, and it’s well worth a read.
Read the whole article: How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive
See the whole post . . .
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