Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox writes about top ten mistakes in web design. He's been doing it for ten years.

When you're in a business that serves people, and the "top ten mistakes" are all about technical features, you must wonder if you're making an even bigger mistake in how you think about making sites.

The color of visited links? PDF files for online reading?? These are honestly the top ten mistakes of web design? I certainly don't know what the top ten errors really are, but I've rewritten some of the Alertbox ones to give you an idea:

• Have Simple pages. De-clutter is good for brains. Web design - including questions about ads, text size, and conventions -- are all about rocketing a page into the user's brain in a pleasant, instantaneous fashion. It's about how the site interacts with normal, human brains.
  
• Have a Simple message. As Ogilvy says, Advertising should be written in sentences of no more than twelve words. What does your site do? We remember short messages. Long messages are usually lost or mangled.
  
• Don't have Random Features. Do you need a search box on your site? Does it return good results? Does searching help the customer or frustrate the customer? Don't have a search box if it's not actually helpful - even if it's supplied by Google and hence requires almost no effort.
  
• Don't have Random Navigation. This clutters your site and your message. I think MySpace is fun, but I can't find anything on it, despite a profusion of navigation menus.
  
• Don't have Broken Features. Do less, better. The original Google philosophy, and possibly still the current one. When you expand, you must know what is key. Address book import does not work for me on MySpace. For MySpace, that is a pretty key feature. If it worked for me, I might have three times as many friends - multiply that by a few million people and you have the cost of that feature not working right.
  

That said, I found the list useful for a couple of reminders, like changing the color of visited links. I have been debating pop-up windows for a while. Personally, sometimes I hate pop-up windows, and sometimes I prefer them. I think most people hate them most of the time, but I have seen them successful on some sites and see them serving a function on Linkspank. The jury will decide. The main reason I think that pop-ups may go is that people have tried it and received negative feedback, so it's scarce on popular sites. Forgetting the jury itself is one of the top ten mistakes on the web. :-)

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