Classic shows : Web Design Podcast (8) – Jakob Nielsen

This week usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, has released his top ten web design mistakes for 2005. Paul and Marcus review the article and provide their own unique perspective on the great man of usability!

The estimated time to read this article is 2 minutes

Posted on: Monday, October 10, 2005

Podcast: Download (17.6MB)

Download this show.

Below is a brief outline of the things covered in this week’s podcast as well as links to some of the sites mentioned:

Feedback

Our thanks to Nick for providing this brilliant example of a site that fails to give the user any idea what it is about…visit periscope now

Thanks too go to Ed for spending us our first MP3 question. If you would like a question answered on the boagworld.com podcast send us an MP3 to [email protected].

News

We are delighted to announce that boagworld.com has teamed with the "Practical Web Design" magazine. Our podcasts are going to ship on their cover CD along with some shows done exclusively for them.

Over the coming week we will be doing an interview with Jeremy Keith of WASP. We are delighted to have Jeremy on the show and can’t wait to do our first interview!

Boagworld.com is running a survey to better understand the needs of our listeners. It will only take a couple of minutes and is completely anonymous. Take the survey now!

Main feature

We do not have much in the way of notes for this weeks feature as it was a review of Jakob Nielsen’s "Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005". We suggest you read the article and decide for yourself if you agree or not!

In the trade these are known as calls to action. Feel free to take your pick!

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http://www.lucentminds.com/ Scott

I haven’t finished this episode yet, but I heard you mention the concept of Hyperlink Etiquette. I work for a company that provided websites for Real Estate agents, and the sites are set frames for all of the pages. As a result, when most of these people create links themselves, they often frame someone else’s page, making it look like their own. Hence I came up with an article explaining why you shouldn’t frame someone else’s page, and how it can hurt your own site. It’s my latest article on my website. I’d appretiate feedback on it. :)
~~
Scott
http://www.boagworld.com Paul Boag

Hmm… I have to say I am not sure I agree with your article Scott. Firstly I believe you should never frame another persons content full stop. Even if you have their permission you are still going to suffer from the generic problems with frames.
Secondly, I am still not convinced you should always open a third party site in a new window (yes, I know I do but I am beginning to change my mind on this). Opening a new window can prove very confusing for many people. Not everybody notices it has happened and can be confused by the fact that the back button does not work.
To be honest I don’t think there is any wrong or right answer here but I would certainly avoid frames at all costs.
http://www.lucentminds.com/ Scott

“Opening a new window can prove very confusing for many people. Not everybody notices it has happened and can be confused by the fact that the back button does not work.”
Hmm. Interesting. I mean I will have to agree. Most of the people I troubleshoot with have no concept about multitasking with Windows. They have no idea that they can check mail in one window, and surf the net in the other.
Thanks! I must ponder this…
~~
Scott
http://www.designersinhouse.com Mathew Patterson

Personally I find it intensely annoying when sites keep opening new windows. Specifically because it breaks out of my nice tabbed browser into another instance that I don’t want.
Most people on the internet are probably not in the same situation, but I do think that when a link takes them in the same window to another site, they understand what has happened and how to get back.
However, if a new windows covers the old one, the back button doesn’t work and they get lost. I’ve seen this in usability tests more than once.
http://www.boagworld.com Paul Boag

Yeah, I know what you mean. I am so torn over this one. I honestly don’t think there is a right or wrong answer over this one. I guess it is dependant on audience etc. Actually truth be told, i probably shouldnt open in a new window on this site as everybody that uses the site is more than capable of making that decision by themselves.
http://www.pagetoscreen.net Chris Jennings

As a MAC user, I am quite used to my browser only taking up part of my screen. In fact, it is not easy to make the browser window full size. On the other hand, most Windows users that I have observed (actually everyone other than me just about!), always hit the little full size window icon top right.
So, most Windows users (actually most of our customers) see the web page covering the whole screen. Opening ANY link in a new window is a disaster for them because most people don’t know that they have covered one window with another. I have seen people go back to Google and restart their search to refind the original page! It would be nice if the hidden window could remind them that it is there somehow (yes, I know it’s on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen).
So, what I say, is don’t open in a new window at all ever, unless it is a popup made specifically for a purpose like enlarged images etc. (these should be made to close when the their focus is lost). Of course, popups is another debate.
Another thing: the use of ‘target’ in a link is deprecated in XHTML.
http://www.boagworld.com Paul Boag

All good points. You still havent convinced me one way or another yet. I think there is probably a place for new windows… btw, notice that this site doesnt use target to open new windows. We use Javascript instead so that I could easily drop the feature if I wanted to… see I plan ahead for my changes in mind ;)
http://www.pagetoscreen.net Chris Jennings

Didn’t mean to imply that YOU would use ‘target’. Just meant, that some do!
Sorry I didn’t convince you but anyway……
Keep up the good work – nice site by the way ..
http://www.chipmunk.cwc.net Chip

Excellent podcast guys, keep up the good work.
I have an addition that would probably come in at about number 197 for most people, but is still annoying and easily avoided.
I refer to the fact that on many sites, an entire paragraph every so often will ‘pretend’ to be a link when you hover over it. The reason for this seems to be lax design. In the CSS they will define that all Anchor tags shall be underlined neon pink italics [or similar] as a hover style . The side effect of this is if they use an [A name="foo"] tag to allow people to jump right to that paragraph from a link, and then enclose the entire paragraph in the tag (which is distressingly common); the entire block of text takes the hover attributes they intended to be for links.
The easy solution for this to my way of thinking would be to either define a ‘link’ class in the CSS, and then make the links [a style='link' href=~etc~] or, if this is too much work for them, to include just the first word of the paragraph in the name anchor.
I have had several pages where the entire page flashes madly between red underlined 12 point bold, and black normal 10 point unless I crank the mouse pointer off to the far extremes of the browser window so it doesn’t ‘hover’ over their sacred texts.
Not really a serious accessibility issue, but a severe usability issue. I imagine for someone with motor and/or co-ordination problems it could become a matter of accessibility however.
http://sdmotors.net lee

periscope
.. is a brand managment/development agency .. they take your brand and help you with every single aspect of it .. from in-house communication to PR and so on .. and they do marvelous work, too ..
but i guess you are absolutely right that it is very hard to get this off their site :)
nice work, guys .. i’m working my way up from episode one .. absolutely marvelous so far! keep it up!
Walter Allred

I just wanted to say that I thought this was one of the funnier episodes.