Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002
"As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002." -- Jakob Nielsen
Quibble: Stating that "websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users" is misleading, since none of the "mistakes" is really new. Still, I did particularly like Nielsen's complaint about companies that place marketing propaganda in FAQ pages.
Discovering Jakob Nielsen's venerable UseIT.com was a fantastic experience for me back in 1997... his articles supplied vocabulary and a methodology that helped me articulate plenty that I had intuited about hypertext and web design (such as why George Landow's visionary Hypertext made sense in terms of elite literary scholarship but didn't seem to apply to anything that I did on the World Wide Web).
At any rate, Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002 compresses all the rhetoric/writing related issues into a singe mistake: "Blocks of Text". (Okay, he also complains about fixed font sizes and horizontal scrolling, but those are hardly new issues.)
Maybe I'm just grumpy because professional websites seem to be better-written than they were before -- either more people have learned what makes good online text, or the post-bust economy means that fewer companies are hiring inexperienced web writers to puff out their pages. At any rate, I find Nielsen's columns to be less and and less useful. The comic-strip illustrations didn't add much to my undestanding of the issue, though a few made me smile.
Re: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002
Nielsen also makes a usability mistake in the form of an assumption in his Fixed Font Size: "Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size." Mozilla's text zoom option does work with style sheets. It's IE's text size option that doesn't. Now, I don't know about Opera or others, but it seems to me that Nielsen is equating IE's performance with browsers in general, promoting the design for IE mentality. A more informative column would give specific instances, rather than creating a false generalization.
Re: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002
Nielsen's web is a big e-commerce site. He's not interested in other uses. So his ideas are great for B2B or C2J or whatever else model of selling something you like. (Or for anything for which you're willing to adopt a selling model.) But I question the utility of his misreading of "usability" for general purposes.
cbd.