10 Usability ordeals you should be familiar with

At times, you just want to get the information you’re after, save it and move along. And you can’t. Usability ordeals — which are relatively the daily routine than an exception — appear every now and again; usually almost every time you type your search keywords in Google.

Neverthless what design you have, and which functionality you have to proposse — if your visitors don’t grasp how they can travel from point A to point B they won’t use your site. In almost every professional design, you need to offer your visitors

• a fair, obvious navigation,
• Literal text-presentation,
• search functionality and
• Noticeable and willful site structure.

And that means that you honestly have to pursue the elemental rules of usability and common sense.

 

1. Hidden log-in link.

Backpack, 37signal’s one of the most convenient organizational and project management tools out there, explains exactly what the tool can be used for, how one can use it and which features it has to offer. However, once you’ve signed up, you might need few minutes to find out what you should do to actually start using the tool.

The “Log in”-link (hint: in the yellow box) should have a greater font-size — also icons would do the job. Every registered user has his/her own personalized page, however new registered users will need a while to find out how they can log in.

 

2. Pop-ups for content presentation.

Approximately each modern web browser adopts a popup-blocker to avoid pop-ups, ad chunks and added site content identified as commercial. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and IE make avail it — hence the idea to use pop-ups to present the main content isn’t apparently the most acceptable idea web-designer might come up with.

 

3. Dragging instead of vertical navigation.

Literally, this technique — not a real nightmare, but very astonishing — might become a new trend in the future. Dragging, as used from .pdf-documents, can also be adapted to web-sites.

 

4. Invisible links.

Visitors have to know where they are, where they’ve been and where they can go next. If designers don’t present this information in an appropriate way, visitors can have serious problems with site navigation

5. Visual noise.

Often less is more. Visual noise is probably one of the most typical problems large web-sites’ designers have to cope with. And it’s extremely easy to get it wrong.

 

Stayed tuned for more…