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Comments on 10 Design Mistakes

Saturday, January 3rd, 2004 at 9:41 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Jakob Nielsen has announced his annual list of top 10 design design mistakes for 2003. He says designers are getting better, but he still sees a few annoyances.

I agree with the unclear statement of purpose. I’ve been reviewing Web sites to determine if they’re worthy of a nomination for a Web design award. So I know nothing about most of the sites. Yet, too many times I arrive at a site and can’t figure out what their purpose is or what it’s about. And such sites do blur their site’s mental model. I’m just clicking blindly trying to figure out what’s happening.

Archiving content… I’ve been guilty of it. When I switched my blog from .html to .php for easier management, all the URLs to the old entries were changed. It was awful, but I had no way of redirecting every entry from its old link to the new. I’m just a small one-person site, but I did set up a redirect for the more popular entries. Businesses should have a plan for this sort of thing. Linkrot is a problem since many search engines still have them in their clutches. Imagine how much easier it would be to use a search engine if sites that no longer existed were cleared out.

Undated content is indeed a problem! I’m a newsletter editor for Shavlik’s The Remediator and eNewsletter Journal where I search for the best of Web articles relating to those newsletters. When selecting an article, I also ensure its freshness. Anything older than three months is out the window.

Many times, I’ve arrived at a site only to see no year or date on it. The only clue might be the copyright year, but that’s a whole twelve months of possibilities. Another clue might be today’s date as the site automatically includes the current date in its code, but the article on the page could be two years old. Many sites have been untouched for over a year, but continue to look current with their automatic dating code.

Difficult to see small thumbnail images — I think this is being wishy washy. He makes a good point in that it’s hard to see the details of a photo when it’s scaled down rather than cropping the more important elements of the picture and then scaling it down. In most cases, the visitor has a clue of what the picture is about based on the text and knows enough to determine if he wants to see a close up or not. His suggestion is a good one, but not a make-or-break a site recommendation.

I haven’t seen too many instances of overly detailed ALT text and I always check for them when I’m reviewing sites for awards. He mention that sites have gotten better about using ALT, but now overdo it. I disagree. When I review nominated sites, I still find that four of every five sites still omits the ALT in its <img> tag. Let’s get this fixed first before worrying about detailed ALT text. The purpose of longdesc is for providing a more detailed description, not ALT. Keep it simple and to the point.

Comments on the rest in another entry.