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Part 2 of Web Design Mistakes of 2003

Monday, January 5th, 2004 at 8:25 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Part 2 of this blog entry. Original posted at InformIT.

I agree with his No “What-If” Support comments. It’s not an easy feature to implement, but the Web should be able to do what real customer support can do. If I call a bookstore, I will ask about a couple of books I’d like to order. I might follow up with asking the shipping charges for one book and then two books. The Web should be able to handle the same.

One of the things I like about eBay is that I can search for an item while telling the search engine to leave out items that have X in their title or description. For instance, I might be looking for Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia, but I definitely don’t want baseball cards, photos, or books. I can tell eBay to conduct such a search. That’s what winnowing by attributes is about – giving the user what she wants and filtering out the things she isn’t interested in. This does ease the user experience, so when you can do it… do it.

Products should be sorted by a variety of things. More and more sites provide us with the capability to sort by brand, name, price, and ratings. This is a big help when I am shopping for an item, but don’t have a specific brand in mind so I want to sort by other attributes. This is what makes the Web stand out from a bricks-and-mortar store – quick sorting. In a bricked store, you have to look at every item and manually compare them.

Yes! I can relate to the overly restrictive form entry. Recently, I was spending too much time entering my phone number in a form because it had to be like so (###) ###-####. (###)###-#### was not acceptable! Drove me nuts. Then, if I missed an item in the form, the Web site sends me back to the form with everything blank so I have to fill it in all over again. This is crazy. It’s easy to implement a feature that retains what the user has filled in and point out what is missing. One site was so bad that I never could give it what it wanted and gave up.

I violate the pages that link to themselves rule. If you go to my home page, there will be a link to the home page through the Home and logo links. I understand Nielsen’s point as I’ve clicked on an item thinking it would take me to the home page when I was actually on the home page. Sometimes the home page doesn’t look like a home page (through design and the URL). I use PHP and didn’t implement additional code to turn off the link when you’re on a specific page. No time and no resources. However, big sites should be able to handle this.

As I review Web sites for a potential nomination, I will take notes of what I see are common problems and report back to you.