Does Your Website Suffer From These 7 Usability Mistakes?
I can safely say that usability these days on the Web is much better than it was several years ago. The Web is growing up and designers are learning and discovering optimal ways of doing things, as well as optimizing and re-working their current sites to make them better and better.
Yet there are still many sites today that make basic mistakes that have a very negative impact on usability and visitor loyalty. Sometimes it’s easier to say what you shouldn’t do instead of do, so here are my 7 usability issues to avoid when working on your websites:
1. Inconsistent site-wide navigation
Site-wide navigation should do two things: show a list of locations you can use to browse the site and show your current location. It should remain the same throughout the site because it is an anchor — it must be familiar so people know what it is and feel in control because they know where they are and how to keep browsing. Changing the navigation will only create confusion, so keep it simple and consistent.
2. Links not identified by color and/or underline
Links are the key elements on a website — they’re the building blocks of the Web. Be sure to make them identifiable. The convention is to make your links blue and underlined. You don’t have to follow this if it clashes with your site’s style, but you do need to make links stand out in some way. I would stay away from making links black unless they’re located in the right context, i.e. a navigation bar.
3. Registration required to view content
Ever been in a situation where you’re searching for something on Google and after finding a good link and clicking through you’re met with a registration request? Hiding away valuable content for registered users only is a serious and frustrating barrier for your visitors and is a great method of driving away traffic.
4. Long registration forms
And not even forms that are too long — anything that’s even remotely long is bad. Registration forms are a serious barrier — you’re forcing your visitors to do some work. People hate filling in forms, so remove anything that’s not absolutely necessary and anything optional off the form. Even if the form looks long, people will be put off. Remember that your users can fill out optional stuff later.
5. Too much pagination
Remember reading an interesting article, then getting to the bottom of the page to find a set of pagination links? It’s frustrating because you now have to load several other pages to finish reading the article. This may drive pageviews up so you can charge more for advertising, but it is really worth it? Not only is it annoying for your visitors, it’s also bad for search engine optimization (SEO) because you’re separating valuable content into other pages. This makes it more difficult for search engine crawlers to understand what each page is about.
6. Text that is too long and un-scannable
Good copywriting is part of web design. Your visitors aren’t going to read your whole page of text because usually they’re looking for something specific or something of interest to them. They do this by scanning the whole page very quickly and looking for things to focus on — so give them those focus points. Use bold text, large headlines and images to provide a scannable structure to your content.
7. No contact information or contact form
Last but not least, if you visitors have a problem with your service (or perhaps want to give you their positive feedback) there should be a way to get in touch. You don’t necessarily need to go all the way and post your email and telephone number on the site, but there should be at least an easy to find contact form. There are sites out there that don’t even have that.
Have any other usability mistakes to add? Please post them in the comments below.
21 Oct, 2008
I’m guilty of #7. well i do have contact info on my site, but people will have to dig for it. I’ve been lazy to set up a contact form.
21 Oct, 2008
Hey Jin, there’s a couple WordPress plugins you can use to generate a form. It’s pretty much plug and play — just need to make a new contact page and paste their code in.
Alternatively, if you want to show your email there’s a cool app called Enkoder (both, an online version and an app for OS X) by Dan Benjamin (http://hivelogic.com/enkoder) — give it an email and it will encrypt it into some javascript code. Can’t vouch for how reliable it is against spam though, but it’s quite nice to be able to write your whole email.
This isn’t such a big deal if you’re just running a blog, but really annoying if it’s a company — especially if you have any problems with them :)
21 Oct, 2008
Long reg forms is something that always turns me off. You should only have to provide enough info to get started i.e. username, email, password.
Nice simple list.
21 Oct, 2008
I have been trying to make my blog as usable as possible. Especially #6 is important, because that’s what people are actually looking for.
21 Oct, 2008
I think #3 is the worst, totally irritating + frustrating!
21 Oct, 2008
Awesome list, not only is it completely spot on, but the suggestions are simple simple simple.
No wild theories here, this is common sense usability and should be the only kind.
21 Oct, 2008
Thanks Bryan.
Lee: I like the registration form on reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com — it’s just username and password fields. I believe reddit even experimented with a dual form for login/registration where you would use the same two fields on the landing page to fill in your details and then either logged in or registered. But they didn’t keep it because it’s too confusing.
Mokokoma: In today’s battle for traffic everyone is shifting to free content, monetized through advertising. I think those people who still lock away stuff behind registration (either free or paid) are going to lose out to the sites who offer the same content with no barriers.
21 Oct, 2008
Working at a state government department here about 3 months ago the lead designer said to me about hyperlinks -
“we have a policy here not to underline links because it detracts from the design and is ugly. I know where links are because when I hover over them a hand appears.”
Add to that the link text was a faded back blue nearly the same colour as the actual text that I found it hard to deal with… and they pay that woman AUD$76K a year!
We parted ways due to differences of opinion, more or less, but number 2 is a big one. And it comes from thinking about the “design” as opposed to the “Design”.
I don’t think I break any of these seven but I probably break a bunch you don’t mention - ie. sometimes I use big words to explain simple concepts.
21 Oct, 2008
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22 Oct, 2008
I have run into a few those in the past, but also in a lot of WordPress themes. Then again, after reading Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think!” book, a lot of these are just common sense overlooked. But, I wonder, why no mention of browser compatibility? Not properly rendering websites in different popular browsers is surely a big no-no in the usability world.
22 Oct, 2008
There are discreet rules, and then there are ‘rules of thumb’, or heuistics if you like. I like the philosophy of studying what your users want, and giving it to them first up!
22 Oct, 2008
Regarding #2, I’ve been turning off link underlining for myself as far back as I can remember. It really is ugly. I’m simply used to identifying links by colour. But changing link behaviour for other people would be very wrong, as you’re deviating from their expected behaviour and, thus, only going to confuse them.
Regarding #5, someone might give you the excuse that pagination saves bandwidth. The right way to address the issue is to auto-paginate, similar to how Google Reader adds more content as the user scrolls down. That way, every one is happy.
22 Oct, 2008
No search function, and no clearly visible ’screenshots’ section for sites that need to deal with those (ie games or programs).
That, and using non-standard naming for standard stuff, ie ‘media’ or ‘gallery’ for ’screenshots’ and ‘get started’ for ‘download’…
22 Oct, 2008
Sorry for the double post, but it really bugs me when news posts of a site / blogs don’t have the “notify me of new replies via email” function. My feedreader (Liferea) doesn’t always show the comments for a post (it seems its blog dependent), and even when it does, it doesn’t notify me of when there are new replies.
So getting the new replies straight to my email is something that is very, very useful - and it’s a fairly trivial thing to setup if you’re using wordpress.
22 Oct, 2008
#5 is extremely annoying. It is just adding another layer of forced user interaction, decreasing usability. Many readers will exit out of pure “laziness” and others will not know enough that the article continues.
All great points though, nice job.
22 Oct, 2008
Also, another thing that annoys me is when sites do not have a selected state for their navigation. It is simple to achieve, yet often times overlooked.
22 Oct, 2008
Nope!
I used to, then I taught a class in usability at the local college and realized how many basic mistakes I was making. I’ve still got a long way to go but I think the site itself (http://thisismyurl.com) meets all the basic usability requirements.
My next goal is to make it profitable :)
22 Oct, 2008
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22 Oct, 2008
Matt: Good point — I’m guilty of not highlighting the current section on this site (although I would argue it’s not very relevant in this context as you tend to browse posts themselves rather than site sections), but I do plan to make some improvements :)
Vadim: I’ll have to add the notify feature :) Your first point is very valid too — I definitely want to see what an application looks like before downloading it and for some reason some developers don’t even upload a single screenshot.
22 Oct, 2008
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24 Oct, 2008
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24 Oct, 2008
I have a question on point #5. Would you say this also applies to just a simple “continue” link on the main page of a blog? Especially where the continue link then links to the entire article?
Doing this on the home page seems to fit with rule #6 since it allows a user to scan the first page for headlines that interest them.
Great post.
Thanks,
Michale
25 Oct, 2008
Excellent article on a subject that can never get enough written about it.
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28 Oct, 2008
Thanks Chris :)
Michael: It doesn’t apply to the continue link because the home page of the type of sites that use it (blogs, magazines etc) usually act as an “index” to the articles — as you said, we scan the articles and choose the ones we want to read. It just applies to situations when there is no way to view the whole article on one page.
I’ve read an article yesterday, can’t remember on which site, about Google’s logo design history, and the whole article was split up into about 6 or 7 pages, each one showing a different version of the logo and some info about it. That was very difficult and annoying to read and should have definitely been all on one page :)
On a related note regarding SEO: I’m not an SEO expert so I don’t know whether showing full posts on the front page is better than cutting them with a “Continue” link. One blog I read called SEOmoz actually shows full post contents on the front page, which is quite interesting. For usability I would prefer actually doing article summaries because people will likely want to have a quick scan.
28 Oct, 2008
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29 Oct, 2008
I’m guilty of #6!! Still trying to figure out a way to fix it without changing the layout too much. :/
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6 Nov, 2008
I could improve on number 7, and add a bit more in the way of providing contact information.
6 Nov, 2008
Sure paulgeo, more information is always great. I’m usually just happy there is a form I can use :)
7 Nov, 2008
hi, first time visitor here, I looked for a “best posts” section , no luck … isn’t a good “usability” function ?
7 Nov, 2008
Blog too young for best posts dinu :) Will definitely be implemented though.
9 Nov, 2008
In line with “7″ I think that some kind of “about” page is required for users to know who the site is by and really get involved. We know who our news anchors are, we know who our authors are, and we know who our reporters are. We should know who our webmasters/bloggers are as well.
11 Nov, 2008
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13 Nov, 2008
Great list in all its simplicity. One to hang on the wall ;-)
16 Nov, 2008
[...] Usability Post » Does Your Website Suffer From These 7 Usability Mistakes? [...]
18 Nov, 2008
I’m guilty of #1 - that’s how I wound up here! In my particular case, I’ve combined an ecommerce site and a blog - but I need to customize the blog to match the ecommerce navigation.
Re: #3 (requiring registration) I have always wondered why people would do that on a blog. Seems like it defeats the purpose of writing it if you’re making it so difficult for others to read.
20 Nov, 2008
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23 Nov, 2008
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26 Nov, 2008
Regarding #7, I think if the site requires the user to register or purchase there needs to be a physical address and telephone number. We’ve had many users in testing sessions say that they’d look for a physical address and telephone number and if the site didn’t have it, they wouldn’t put their financial details forward.
In some countries, it’s a legal requirement for e-commerce sites to give a physical address. But, moreover, it increases users’ trust in the company.