Meryl's Notes Blog

After reviewing over 100 sites for a potential “Best Site” nomination, I’ve made a list of annoyances based on experience, research, and being a user. These are not necessarily the TOP annoyances, but they appeared often.

Print This and Use It

Print out puzzles, games, and worksheets. What’s the point when you can get it from a newspaper or at school? True, it’s free as opposed to buying a newspaper, but that is the beauty of the Web — you can do such stuff online. We have plenty of worksheets and coloring pages offline, why should add more clutter to the Internet with such files?

Drop-down out of Control

Drop-down items that whisk you away to the select item as soon as it’s touched are a problem since many people who don’t even have hand movement challenges lose control of the mouse and that’s not where they want to go. So imagine how difficult it is for those who have hand or movement challenges.

Same goes for drop-down menus where you select a topic then sub-topics pop-out for your selection. Too many times, it was a battle of mouse precision to get to where I want to go and I’m comfortable with the mouse. A way around it is to make the topic clickable — that way you cover all the bases. If a person can’t or won’t click on the subtopic fly out, he can just click on the topic and go from there.

Besides, he has made a decision he wants to go there only to be surprised with more choices and has to reconsider his decision.

Alt

It’s surprising how few sites omit ALT from <img>. It doesn’t take much to add it and it’s supposed to be short. Longdesc is for those that need more detail. Worse are sites who don’t even use alt=”" for invisible gifs, which should be going out the door anyway.

Animated banners (not just for ads)

Are the designers trying to show off their Flash or programming capabilities? Showing off is not worth the price of usability. It’s disctracting. One-time animation is fine, but repeating confuses my eyes as they struggle to read the content with that moving thingy distracting them.

Snowfall Effect Is out

A site actually had snowflakes falling all over its pages and being in a warm weather state, it felt more like winter. However, this is a cutesy feature suited for personal sites. See animated banners complaint.

Also along the lines of the snowfall effect is the follow the pointer effect where stars or some other images fly and follow your mouse pointer where you go. This is also so ’90s.