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Usability expert at work? CC: Bela donna by hypertypos.
Today, November 13th, is World Usability Day. I’m not really involved in it in spite of being really interested in
- usability
- user-centered design
- findability.
With my soon 12 years of online publishing experience I’m still more of a DIY guy who learns everything himself by trial and error. I rarely go to conferences and the likes.
So being both keen on usability and an industry outsider I have a unique view point on usability.
In fact I can’t ignore my impression today that many usability experts commit basic usability mistakes on the Web.
Here are the 7 usability mistakes usability experts commit:
No images
Imagine a magazine cover without an image. Images of women have proved most successful at selling magazines of all kinds. Usability experts seem to hate women, they never display any on their pages. Don’t they want the people to actually use their sites? Websites need eye-catchers like magazines do. Use striking pictures.
Too much text
Usability websites tend to look like they’ve been built in 1995 when people still browsed without images. Not only that, they really focus on text. So in spite of the fact that the text is split up in small chunks you see huge loads of text on usability sites. It’s just too much. People do not read long texts on the Web, not even divided ones. Also strictly text based pages are not attractive enough to retain quick to leave users, especially from social media.
Too large text
Usability experts love large fonts. I do too but not for the sake of them but for readability. Too large fonts aren’t readable as well. The eye can’t discern many too large letters at once so you are forced to look closely and strain your eyes.
Too much white space
I love white space for my eyes to rest on the Web and I use it myself excessively. It’s partly due to the fact that I’m not a designer myself though so I cant style it in a way that makes sense other than white. Usability experts tend to make sites all white on purpose. Excessive white space has at least two major disadvantages. An all white page appears empty. It’s too bright on the screen.
No or “sad” colors
While I guess usability experts want you not to hurt your eyes on the Web which is a noble gesture they seem to assume we’re all babies or something. Usability experts rarely use fresh, striking and bright colors. You don’t have to make your text red, but an occasional red element on your page does not hurt! Otherwise try a nice green or blue!
Boring interfaces
Why is everybody buying and using the iPhone lately? It’s not just a usable interface it has a sleek and sexy interface! Why are most leading usability websites that boring? Don’t they have designers working for them too? Or is it because they hate women so hey don’t want to be sexy?
Ugly headlines
Have you ever seen a huge bold Verdana headline on Windows? It’s clumsy and it’s ugly and it’s usability headline font #1. You barely can distinguish the letters due to their sheer thickness. Usability sites Useit.com (Jakob Nielsen himself!), Usabilityfirst.com and even Upassoc.org use them, the latter in white where they’re even more difficult to read on the Web.
Just visit the sites that rank in the top 10 for usability. The World Usability Day site is not as bad as most of them but
only a few usability sites manage to be attractive.
What’s the use of usability if your site is so ugly that nobody visits it or stays there?
More articles by myself on usability:
- For Design, Usability and SEO Simplicity Is Key
- Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
- 10 Usability Sins that Make me Bounce and Never Come Back
- The 7 Simplest Ways To Lower Your Bounce Rate and Get More Conversions
- 50+ Must Read Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO Articles | SEOptimise
- 7 Must Read Design + Usability + SEO Articles
- 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
- Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources
This thing has 14 Comments
True. I make the second mistake. When I start to write something, I don’t stop and make the paragraphs long. I always have to re-read what I’m writing and every time I find that I have written a long text, I pinch myself and say “Common, people won’t read if you are writing like this”.
Ugly headline? I don’t make that mistake but have seen many people do it.
Good post, Tad.
I agree whole-heartedly! I never understood why those usability experts are so bad at design. A site can look good and still be “usable”.
Usability “experts” are a leftover from the 20th century when usability was all about being scientific and tracking eye movements and “the visitor has to know where they are, where they came from and how to get out.” Yeah, I had a person once ask me how to get out of a “black hole website” that had no external links to anything else but that was back in 1995, for pete’s sake. Web users these days are a lot more sophisticated and they expect things to LOOK good. Maybe that’s why, despite being unreadable by search engines for what, 10 years, Flash is still around.
I’m still curious about YOUR headline though… heh.
akh i so agree!
specially with the one of women! i have studied art for four years now and by experience put a lady and get a great mark.
come up with a fabelous concept and you are just a cliché! meh!
All good points, but the “hating women” thing went overboard. It was funny at first, but then it just got offensive. You sound like a feminist or something.
All true points! Wish more people and clients would read this ^_^
Yes. I agree with you. Especially your examples abt some usability site. I too felt the same abt these sites. Nice catching.
Images provide high interactivity features and style sophistication. To many words dilute your target keywords. the rests of the seven were results of poor search engine optimization which i could say no longer an seo.
I do only party agree. You’re right when you say that they usually fail at designing web pages, but I really don’t think it is that important for their sites to just look good, or keep texts short and nice to read.
It’s about explaining how you can make applications or website usable. Design is irrelevant to their cause. Usability is universal value but design is a personal choice.
I’ve seen lot of usability reports in the open source world and every good report I’ve seen is a PDF file with at least 40 pages. Usability measures have to be explained in detail, there is no place for short, nice looking but worthless articles.
At leas that’s my opinion.
I dont think its fair to compare a magazine cover to a website homepage. The purpose of an image on a magazine cover is to draw attention among a shelf load of competiting magazines. To stand out among the crowd and to sell using an article inside. As you never look @ 50 homepages at a time, each one bidding for your attention, you dont need an image to make you enter a particular site. However, websites do need images to bring focus to a particular area of a page and to help the user establish the purpose or theme of the page or site.
Really great points you have made. Usability site example and the too much text and too large text is just wow.
Is that true images of women have proved most successful at selling magazines? I think writter can also use other object to attract reader interest. I’m a woman but I must say that many other images are more interesting than just women images.
To Lucy Andrez, beautiful women images will eye-catch most readers. Men are attracted because it is natural, women are attracted because they want to know why this girl looks pretty?
Not only women images are successful for website, but also for social networks. You can use it like a photo in social network and you will get many friends especially men.
Wow. Who would have thought that anyone would, could ever make that many obvious mistakes? This will keep me on my toes!
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