as you see I can’t keep myself quiet even in the christmas break ;-) however I thought you would be interested in the yearly top ten web design mistakes edited by usability guru jakob nielsen. nielsen’s list of main mistakes is a very good summary of the main pitfalls in web design he/we discovered throughout the year.
since his own website looks horrible from a visual (and also aesthetic) point of view, consequently his criticism is less focused on visual web design issues (the look) rather than website usability (the feel). and there his observations hit the mark: this year’s list ranges from ‘Unclear Statement of Purpose’ over ‘Products Sorted Only by Brand’ to minor but annoying pitfalls as ‘Overly Restrictive Form Entry’.
from a designmanagement perspective his insights are important to note. while the importance of the visual dimension of a website as part of a company’s overall corporate identity can’t be stressed too much it belongs to the responsibilities of designmanagers to make sure that the underlying concept of a website is coherent. some years ago this responsibility was reflected as ‘information architect’ on our business cards (’new economy’ times, right ;-) and in the meantime a lot changed however I still believe that designmanagers are, among others, ‘information architects’ not only restircted to web projects.
check the full top ten and access top ten list from previous years >>>
for more information about nielsen and his colleague’s activities you might want to read a post I published two weeks ago: “when good design leads to bad products”. bruce tognazzini (the author of the online column ‘askTOG’) is also a member of the “Nielsen/Norman Group | NN/g.
