Write

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

December 22, 2003 in
Short URL: http://boyink.me/s/2206

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031222.html
At this point, I’ve literally published more than a thousand Web usability guidelines.

OK, now stop.

Seriously, is it “useful” to have 1000 published guidelines?  I’m thinking people tuned out a couple hundred or so back.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

  1. kevin on December 23, 2003

    I respect Mr Nielsen and I think he has contributed a lot. However, things like #9 Overly Restrictive Form Entry, seems a bit silly. “A typical example is when forms ask users for their first and last names as two items, rather than simply letting users enter their full name in a single field, which is much faster to type.” Well, what if there is a requirement to save the first and last name sepatately? What about the name “Billy Bob Thornton” or “Paul Van Der Bijl” or the like? How is the computer supposed to know which is the first and which is the last? Besides, I’m quite used to entering my first and last name separately.

    Also, #10, Pages That Link to Themselves—what is the big deal about this? It stikes me that this is more of a Jakob annoyance (or dare I say “insecurity”?) than anything else. Has anyone ever complained to you that you have a link to the homepage on the homepage? I didn’t think so.

  2. Michael Boyink (Author) on December 23, 2003

    #10 - Yeah - MeanDean dinged the RidgePoint site for that one..;)

    I agree - it seems to most happen on hompages, and I think due to a common file being used for site navigation.  The RP site uses an include file for the main nav, and I don’t want to maintain 2 of them just so the home page can have a special, un-linked one.

    I may have sounded overly hard on Jakob, but sometimes I think he’d be taken more seriously with a slightly different style. 

    Boasting about the number of “guidelines” you’ve written might be viewed differently if written as “our research and user testing has uncovered a number of guidelines for web designers”, but I’m actually not sure how many of his “guidelines” are research-based these days.—his last book was nothing but his commentary on a bunch of sites.

  3. Mean Dean on December 27, 2003

    So long as there is a “great could of witlessness” out there online, there will always be a need for such lists.

    Though I agree, I’m inclined to think that Nielsen did stretch a bit on some of these.

    That said, they’re good ips.

Back to Article

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.