sw'as

Some things to strive for in the re-design?

I just added a new feed to my Bloglines account thanks to a link by Phu 1. The feed I added is from Design by Fire (DxF) and the reason I added it was because of their Design Eye for the Usability Guy.

The Usability Guy, for those of you who don't know and couldn't be bothered reading the linked article, is Jakob Nielsen. Jakob Nielsen, as any web developer worth a pinch of salt will tell you, is regarded (by many) as The King of Web Usability, and he's pretty good at it. What he's not particularly good at2 (as a quick look at his website will tell you) is design. Nonetheless, the usability principles he espouses are very important for anyone who designs websites and useit.com is well worth keeping an eye on.

His latest alert box3 gives us the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes for 2005. And they are:

  1. Legibility Problems
  2. Non Standard Links
  3. Flash
  4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
  5. Bad Search
  6. Browser Incompatibility
  7. Cumbersome Forms
  8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
  9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
  10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

His actual article has much more detail about each of the mistakes and some links to good resources where you can find out much more about avoiding these mistakes.

  1. Phu Ly's If..Else Log is one of my most valuable feeds. While fully blown articles are few and far between on If...Else when they do get posted they are of an exceptional standard. In the in between times, while we are waiting, Phu provides a continual peppering of links to informative, invaluable, interesting and fun web content. If...Else, along with one of my other most read blogs (Entrepreneur's Journey), is one of the most recent inductees into the 9rules network - by far the best web log network out there (IMO). [↩]
  2. Or should that be, what he doesn't focus on? [↩]
  3. Why aren't they in an RSS feed already? [↩]