Web Design Mistakes that Continue On and On
Maybe there is nothing new under the sun
10 Design Mistakes
Since 1996, we have been compiling lists of the top 10 mistakes
in web design. This year, we completed a large-scale usability
study with 215 participants in the United States and United
Kingdom to see what today’s web-design mistakes are. After
analyzing results across 43 sites that ranged from small, local
businesses to entertainment sites to nonprofits to global
organizations, we identified 10 of the most common and most
damaging web-design mistakes that hurt our users. (And by
hurting their users, these design flaws most definitely also hurt the
websites’ business metrics.)
The big news?
None of the top issues today is new or surprising.
Web design has come a long way. But these
persistent problems remain. Modern design patterns and
aesthetics change, but underlying user needs remain the same.
Users still need to find information, be able to read it, and know
what to click and where it leads.
How many of these mistakes is your website making?
1. People can’t use information they can’t find.
Many sites offer poor category names that don’t adequately or accurately describe the content within them. Others are arranged based on how the company — rather than the user — thinks about content. When the site structure doesn’t match the users’ mental models of how information should be organized, people are unable to locate what they need.
A note to the wise:
Involve users in creating your site structure. A little usability work
such as card sorting, tree testing, or usability testing can go a long
way in creating a site structure that makes sense to users.
When users can’t clearly distinguish between similar navigational
categories or links, they struggle to find the right path to content.
Category and link names need to make sense on their own,
but also in conjunction with other options on the site.
If multiple sections or pages could address a specific information
need, users must explore each or make their best guess.
Alternatively, they may turn to search or even leave the site.
Card sorting and usability testing
can help avoid overlapping category names. Problems with
links that are too similar often
stem from poor content strategy. Two likely causes for these
problems are:
Poor labeling: The links lead to different content, but, for
some reason, they have similar labels. If that’s the case, try
renaming your links to differentiate them from one another.
Poor content differentiation: If links lead to different pages
with highly related information, the solution may be not to
rename the links, but to reorganize and consolidate the
content.
Some sites offer small bits of information scattered around the
site, with little or no connection between them.
When users find one such island of information without links to
other related information, they have no reason to think that
another area of the site offers supplementary material. If people
need additional information, they may move to a competitor’s site
or to Google to acquire it.
Users trying to revisit the information may end up in an entirely
different area of the site, with a different view of content than in
the first experience. Those who do locate the disjointed
information, are left to piece it together. Either way, they are left
with a negative impression of the site.
From an organization’s perspective, this is not only a user-
experience failure, but also a content-management nightmare:
information in one area of the site may duplicate, differ from, or
even contradict information elsewhere.
One solution is to add related links between pages that offer
related information. A better solution is to consider why
information is scattered throughout the site, consolidate it as
appropriate, and pick the best spot for it. Other areas of the site
can refer to the primary location for content about that topic,
instead of replicating the information.
Even if users can determine the right site location for their
information needs, they can still be stymied by unexpected or
lengthy workflows.
Web teams often ask how many clicks it should take to get to
content. There is no magic number — the quality of the clicks
matters far more than the quantity. Users should get closer to
the information goal as they click through pages. Repetitive clicks
that force people to select what they want again and again
aggravate users and require them to spend unnecessary effort.
Teams sometimes build pages in isolation and do not consider the
route to the content they’ve created. When creating new pages,
review how the user will get there and to see if a more direct path
is possible.