In March 2003, Philippe Randour pointed out the Top 7 Usability Blunders Of The Big Players here on SitePoint. Since then, Web usability practices have become even more commonplace, and knowledge of the many Web usability benefits has become more widespread. The big players must surely have improved since then, right? Let’s find out… Full Article >>
For someone known as “the usability guy” at a former job, I’m either getting older, more cynical, or just plain bored with articles like this.
Sure, there are some valid points here. But what I don’t like about this article and others of it’s Nielsen-esqe ilk is that they involve no actual “users”. Note the “users may become”, “they may doubt”, “may be unclear” wording. What the author is really saying is “I’m not exactly sure what users would do here, but will write about a potential problem rather than testing to see if there’s an actual problem”.
In the end this is more harmful than helpful for the web design community as we don’t know what issues are truly worth spending our design time on solving.
Please—Let’s take a cue from the scientific community and not publish untested hypothesis. Run some people through the site and see what happens. Document and publish that instead.
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