Since you’ll spend lots of time and money to create your web site, don’t you want to make sure you’re not making mistakes that at best irritate users, and at worst make you lose customers?After all, when you alienate users, you lose potential revenue. Who can afford that?
Dr. Jakob Nielsen, Principal of
Nielsen Norman Group, says that top 10 website mistakes include:
1. Not listing prices. Pricing in most specific piece of information users need to understand nature of offers. By not providing pricing, people feel lost and it reduces their understanding of a product line. Prices let users differentiate among products.
2. Inflexible search engines. Overly literal search engines reduce user ability because they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, etc. It’s also bad when search engines prioritize on basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance.
3. Horizontal scrolling. Users hate scrolling left to right. Pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows (800x600 pixels) are terrible.
4. Fixed font size. About 95 percent of time, this fixed font size is tiny, reducing readability significantly. Users need to be able to resize text as needed.
