http://www.goatsonline.com/funny-goats/latest/other-animals.html
The following points need more works:
1. Lack of Navigation Support
Don’t assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They always have difficulty finding information, so they need support in the form of a strong sense of structure and place. Start your design with a good understanding of the structure of the information space and communicate this structure explicitly to the user. Provide a site map and let users know where they are and where they can go. Also, you will need a good search feature since even the best navigation support will never be enough.
2. Non-Standard Link Colors Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don’t mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean.
3. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos
It’s great that websites are now using smaller pictures. Avoiding the bloated designs of the past decreases download time and increases information richness. It’s also good when sites link small pictures to bigger pictures, so users have the option of seeing the image in more detail.The main problem here is that websites typically produce small images by simply scaling down bigger images. If an original photo has a lot of intricate detail, the thumbnail is often incomprehensible.
4. Non-Standard Use of GUI Widgets
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. Every time you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That’s good. The more users’ expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users’ expectations, the more they will feel insecure. Oops, maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a tomato and jump a mile into the sky.
Interaction consistency is an additional reason it’s wrong to open new browser windows: the standard result of clicking a link is that the destination page replaces the origination page in the same browser window. Anything else is a violation of the users’ expectations and makes them feel insecure in their mastery of the Web.
Currently, the worst consistency violations on the Web are found in the use of GUI widgets such as radio buttons and checkboxes. The appropriate behavior of these design elements is defined in the Windows Vista User Experience standard, the Macintosh human interface standard, and the Java UI standard. Which of these standards to follow depends on the platform used by the majority of your users (good bet: Windows), but it hardly matters for the most basic widgets since all the standards have close-to-identical rules.
For example, the rules for radio buttons state that they are used to select one among a set of options but that the choice of options does not take effect until the user has confirmed the choice by clicking an OK button. Unfortunately, I have seen many websites where radio buttons are used as action buttons that have an immediate result when clicked. Such wanton deviations from accepted interface standards make the Web harder to use.
(See also: Non-standard GUI controls were one of the biggest usability problems identified in our usability testing of 46 Web-based applications in Flash. For updated info, see our full-day seminar on Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design)
5. Lack of Biographies
My first Web studies in 1994 showed that users want to know the people behind information on the Web. In particular, biographies and photographs of the authors help make the Web a less impersonal place and increase trust. Personality and point-of-view often wins over anonymous bits coming over the wire. Yet many sites still don’t use columnists and avoid by-lines on their articles. Even sites with by-lines often forget the link to the author’s biography and a way for the user to find other articles by the same author.
It is particularly bad when a by-line is made into a mailto: link instead of a link to the author’s biography. Two reasons:
- it is much more common for a reader to want to know more about an author (including finding the writer’s other articles) than it is for the reader to want to contact the author – sure, contact info is often a good part of the biography, but it should not be the primary or only piece of data about the author
- it breaks the conventions of the Web when clicking on blue underlined text spawns an email message instead of activating a hypertext link to a new page; such inconsistency reduces usability by making the Web less predictable
