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Web Usability Blunders That Still Piss Me Off

10 points by pclark 18y ago

Megasumo 18y ago
I am sorry -but your site could also be considered a Usability blunder. Will not go over too many issues I have but for instance having the link text one shade darker then primary color is considered bad.
- illicium 18y ago
  I can't believe he used the stock Photoshop blue-brown landscape gradient for his site logo. Ugh.
tom_rath 18y ago
Looks like he forgot "Don't put textured background behind site content".
bd 18y ago
One extremely annoying thing that is rarely mentioned is very very slow scroll speed. I think it may have something to do with background images and/or transparency. Even some quite prominent sites suffer from this flaw (making them almost unusable for me): http://ajaxian.com http://ajaxian.com http://jayisgames.com http://jayisgames.com
- Jebdm 18y ago
  These scroll fine for me, but the pages are very long, which itself could be considered a usability blunder.
  - bd 18y ago
    Which OS and browser do you use? I'm on Windows XP with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. I have the same trouble in release Firefox and latest Chrome. Explorer 7 and latest Safari is fine. Latest Opera is ok, though JayIsGames is killing its silly wait-till-all-small-stuff-is-loaded rendering engine. BTW I see this problem on many sites. These two were just ones that popped into my mind.
    - Jebdm 18y ago
      I'm currently running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Firefox 3.0.4, but I dual boot and I've never had that problem on Windows Vista and Firefox 3.0.4 either. I don't think it matters, but my processor is an AMD Turion 64-bit dual core. Maybe it's a difference in some algorithm between FF/Chrome and Explorer/Opera/Safari, though Chrome and Safari share at least most of their rendering code. That leads me to believe that it's probably something to do with Flash or something embedded. I don't know what to tell you, though, I've never had any problems, and my computer isn't even that fast. What are your computers' specs?
      - bd 18y ago
        Hmmm, I think it's computer speed. I use notebook with just a single core 1.7 GHz Pentium M. What's interesting is that for me page scrolling speed isn't spread over many values for different sites. It's either fast (majority of sites) or very slow (some sites). That's why I didn't suspect computer speed. It did look more like rendering engine bug / inefficient code path for particular layout/image/CSS combinations. It seems like some designs trigger heavy computation, which is not noticeable on faster systems, but is very painful on slower machines.
- ivank 18y ago
  This is barely noticeable on faster computers, so many designers miss this. The browser has to re-draw the whole page because some of it scrolls, yet the static background doesn't.
  - bd 18y ago
    That's it. Now I realized I have seen a naturally occurring test case: Twitter user pages with and without static background images. Everything else is the same, yet the ones with the static background image (CSS => background-attachment:fixed) are much slower.
- thwarted 18y ago
  I've been using Web Developer's Toolbar "Images | Hide background images" to work around this on sites where my want to read them is greater than the annoyance of background images.
Jebdm 18y ago
I agree with most of his points, but two of them seem a little off to me. STOP underlining text that isn’t a LINK - There are a lot of places where underlining makes sense. If you've got the links in a different color, then it shouldn't be an issue; besides, after one click users will figure it out (please don't tell me this isn't true or I'll lose all faith in humanity). I still really hate dynamic dropdown menus. A lot. - Sometimes they make sense. They probably shouldn't be part of your main navigation, but they work well for things like country and state/province selectors. Remember to have it degrade gracefully, though.
- xiaoma 18y ago
  I agree about underlined text, and I found one other glaring error: At first glance, this makes perfect sense - except for the fact that not everyone visiting your website will be English-speaking, and the word for “information” doesn’t start with an “i” in every language. Visitors to my sites written in English will be English speaking. Either that, or they'll face much more pressing problems than how I abbreviate the word "information".
xiaoma 18y ago
My personal pet peeve is when sites don't resize gracefully. Text should wrap, rather than float off the left side of the browser. Many sites, including this one, are unreadable at a width of 500 pixels, which is my preferred reading width. Having to use the FF web developer addon to disable CSS on page after page gets old.

10 points by pclark 18y ago

I am sorry -but your site could also be considered a Usability blunder. Will not go over too many issues I have but for instance having the link text one shade darker then primary color is considered bad.

illicium 18y ago
I can't believe he used the stock Photoshop blue-brown landscape gradient for his site logo. Ugh.

tom_rath 18y ago

Looks like he forgot "Don't put textured background behind site content".

bd 18y ago

One extremely annoying thing that is rarely mentioned is very very slow scroll speed. I think it may have something to do with background images and/or transparency. Even some quite prominent sites suffer from this flaw (making them almost unusable for me): http://ajaxian.com http://ajaxian.com http://jayisgames.com http://jayisgames.com

Jebdm 18y ago
These scroll fine for me, but the pages are very long, which itself could be considered a usability blunder.
- bd 18y ago
  Which OS and browser do you use? I'm on Windows XP with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. I have the same trouble in release Firefox and latest Chrome. Explorer 7 and latest Safari is fine. Latest Opera is ok, though JayIsGames is killing its silly wait-till-all-small-stuff-is-loaded rendering engine. BTW I see this problem on many sites. These two were just ones that popped into my mind.
  - Jebdm 18y ago
    I'm currently running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Firefox 3.0.4, but I dual boot and I've never had that problem on Windows Vista and Firefox 3.0.4 either. I don't think it matters, but my processor is an AMD Turion 64-bit dual core. Maybe it's a difference in some algorithm between FF/Chrome and Explorer/Opera/Safari, though Chrome and Safari share at least most of their rendering code. That leads me to believe that it's probably something to do with Flash or something embedded. I don't know what to tell you, though, I've never had any problems, and my computer isn't even that fast. What are your computers' specs?
    - bd 18y ago
      Hmmm, I think it's computer speed. I use notebook with just a single core 1.7 GHz Pentium M. What's interesting is that for me page scrolling speed isn't spread over many values for different sites. It's either fast (majority of sites) or very slow (some sites). That's why I didn't suspect computer speed. It did look more like rendering engine bug / inefficient code path for particular layout/image/CSS combinations. It seems like some designs trigger heavy computation, which is not noticeable on faster systems, but is very painful on slower machines.
ivank 18y ago
This is barely noticeable on faster computers, so many designers miss this. The browser has to re-draw the whole page because some of it scrolls, yet the static background doesn't.
- bd 18y ago
  That's it. Now I realized I have seen a naturally occurring test case: Twitter user pages with and without static background images. Everything else is the same, yet the ones with the static background image (CSS => background-attachment:fixed) are much slower.
thwarted 18y ago
I've been using Web Developer's Toolbar "Images | Hide background images" to work around this on sites where my want to read them is greater than the annoyance of background images.

Jebdm 18y ago

I agree with most of his points, but two of them seem a little off to me. STOP underlining text that isn’t a LINK - There are a lot of places where underlining makes sense. If you've got the links in a different color, then it shouldn't be an issue; besides, after one click users will figure it out (please don't tell me this isn't true or I'll lose all faith in humanity). I still really hate dynamic dropdown menus. A lot. - Sometimes they make sense. They probably shouldn't be part of your main navigation, but they work well for things like country and state/province selectors. Remember to have it degrade gracefully, though.

xiaoma 18y ago
I agree about underlined text, and I found one other glaring error: At first glance, this makes perfect sense - except for the fact that not everyone visiting your website will be English-speaking, and the word for “information” doesn’t start with an “i” in every language. Visitors to my sites written in English will be English speaking. Either that, or they'll face much more pressing problems than how I abbreviate the word "information".

xiaoma 18y ago

My personal pet peeve is when sites don't resize gracefully. Text should wrap, rather than float off the left side of the browser. Many sites, including this one, are unreadable at a width of 500 pixels, which is my preferred reading width. Having to use the FF web developer addon to disable CSS on page after page gets old.