Bonus points to whoever recognized the blog title as a bitchin' Bob Dylan song (modified a bit, of course). Anyway, via delicious, I came across an
article that excerpted a book called
Prioritizing Web Usability, written by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger. The book seems like it could be an interesting read (although there's probably about a gajillion books out there on the same subject, so I wonder if this one offers up anything new). According to the authors, the top 8 recurring web site offenses are:
- Links that don't change color when visited
- Breaking the Back button
- Opening new browser windows
- Pop-up windows
- Design elements that look like advertisements
- Violating Web-wide conventions
- Vaporous content and empty hype
- Dense content and unscannable text
Under Offense #7, the article adds the following:
The practice of making web sites more visible by search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The more concrete your text, the better your site will rank in search engines. As we saw in Chapter 2, users researching a potential purchase almost always start with a search. This makes SEO the No. 1 marketing technique for web sites, and using clear, basic words is the No. 1 SEO technique because these are the words that people enter into search engines.
Hooray for SEO! Seriously though, are there any other offenses any of you would add to or subtract from the list? I personally sort of like it when new browser windows (or better yet, tabs) are opened up because I often like to stay on the site I'm at. Your thoughts?
You may be interested in his "other site", for something more user interesting. https://usability.typepad.com/jakob_nielsen - What if Jakob Nielsen Had a Blog?
Loved the third one.
Jakob Nielsen has the same last name as Rick Nielsen (Chip Trick) who's son Miles Nielsen is the manager of the Wandering Sons whose organ player is Augie Meyers who played organ on Dylan's "Things Have Changed which happens to be the title of this thread.
...sorry but that's the only thing I can add here.
Very cool and Six Degrees-esque! I'm impressed.
... you do know Jakob is The name in web usability, right? Sorry, it just sounded like you'd never heard of him. Ever contraversial ("Have you seen his site?? How can he claim to be the usability czar when his own site is so ugly and unusable?"), Jakob has been issuing edicts on how websites can be more usable since, oh, the mid 1990s, at least. :)
Is his site really that heinous? I haven't heard of him, but I am an SEO/web usability newbie, so I'm just now starting to rub elbows with the elite.
Yeah - who the hell is "Jakob Nielsen"? Must be one of those small time operators :)
Tiling backgrounds, scrolling text, and midis.
Is it the 1990s or am I stuck on MYSPACE? AUUGHHH!!
This one is probably covered by item 6 which is pretty generic, but some web sites seem to think it's a good idea to hide links by making them the same color as regular text and removing the underline. Or even sillier is when some links are underlined and others aren't.
I'm also not a fan of flyout menus. Sadly, I'm working on a site that has flyout menus in the top nav, left nav, and from ads on the right. Ugh.
What about old dead links, big ugly images, and poor whitespace