Really beautiful Flash animations and design that catch the eye.
The over abundance of animations, particularly the central movie, distract the user from the real useful content.
Main points of interest, aside from their skill and creation (not necessarily design), are obscured on the edges in small text.
The entirety of the site's content is within the Flash animation, making it completely inaccessible to anyone with any visual impairment, starting at light nearsightedness.
The soundtrack is really cool.
Jakob Nielsen articles
Fundamentals of usability on the web
Nielsen discusses what usability means and what creating usable web sites and utilities entails. He states five main points behind usability:
Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction
Most importantly, a site must be easy to figure out for a novice user, easy to navigate consistently, and easy to remember (both from a product memory angle and a layout angle) upon return visits. This is so any user who comes to the site can make use of the content and find whatever service is being provided.
Nielsen puts usability in temrs of a continuing process throughout the whole design phase and early implementation, so that bugs and difficulties can be worked out as they arise and not as an impassable mass at the end.
Top 10 mistakes in web design
In this article, Nielsen presents what he sees as the ten most egregious errors that people commonly make is designing for the web. These include elements of style, usability, simple functionality, and common courtesy. They are:
Bad search hinders users from finding what they want on your site.
PDF files for online reading break up the flow of web reading and navigating, not to mention that some users don't have Acrobat Reader software installed and some browsers do not support opening non-web files within the browser window.
Not changing the color of visited links can confuse users about where they have been and need to go. For example, if you present a series of readings broken up into chapters that are linked to in a table of contents (like our Unix tutorial), it can be hard to remember which document you were on and which one you should read next, making users frustrated.
Non-scannable text is a pain because users can't find topics of interest, subheadings, or even simple section breaks well, and thus may skip it as just to bothersome.
Fixed font size can limit what some users can see on a page. If a user is visually impaired, they may want to increase text size to read better, and fixed small text does not allow this. However, if a user is interested in pictures or design and layout only, they may wish to shrink the text from distracting levels (like in a photo gallery).
Page titles with low search engine visibility make it harder for users to find your site and the information on it. This hurts both content providers and users and the mutually beneficial exchange of information may not occur.
Anything that looks like an advertisement will almost certainly be ignored and may even make users want to leave a page (how credible can it be if there are ad banners all over?).
Violating design conventions is tricky because you do not want to look like everyone else, but you do want to work like them, since users have likely been to other sites before yours.
Opening new browser windows is simply offensive. No one wants to have their screen cluttered, their navigational control taken away, or lose the use of the Back button. Also, new windows can be blocked by some browsers or may be closed on sight by users expecting ads.
Not answering users' questions is just rude to begin with, and doesn't help anyone either. If a user has a question, it means they have enough interest to ask the question about your service, so you should answer it and let them use or buy to their heart's content.
None of these mistakes mean instant death to a site, but each one adds to user frustration and detracts from the success and enjoyment of their experience, so they should be avoided if at all possible.
Author: Andrew H. Lyons <About me>
Last modified: Monday, 13 February 2006 at 16:35 UTC.
