Shlock and Awe: Little Things on Your Website that Drive People Nuts
No website will ever be perfect (unfortunately), but we’ve compiled a list of little tweaks and changes you can check on your website to make sure you’re not irritating your visitors. Go through this list of our top 8 pet peeves and change what you can to create a more usable, less annoying, and generally more enjoyable website that your visitors will be ecstatic to visit:
1. Microcopy – Do you require a form for your website visitors to receive information or to contact you? One of the best things you can do to these seemingly pesky forms is to make sure the “submit” button you most likely include, is modified to state exactly what happens when a user sends their information. Does the form actually send an email to a sales rep? Say so with a button that states, “Send my request”. Does your form subscribe someone to your newsletter? Maybe your button should say, “Sign me up”. This little change can help your visitors feel more comfortable using your forms.
2. Company information inaccessibility – We’re not here to bash flash (though that is quite catchy, huh?), but if you must have your Flash website up and running, just be sure your important company information is in readable, copy-and-pasteable text so users can quickly skip on over to your site and grab the information they need. Too often are companies’ contact information and phone number, along with employee bios and titles, stuck right into Flash (or in an image), making it difficult for customers to record your information, or members of the press to grab the information they need to promote you!
3. Goose hunt for company information – Not only should your company info be readable and copy-and-pasteable, but it must be easy to find. If a customer comes to your custom t-shirt design webpage and wants to make an order now, they should be able to find your number or email now. Never make a customer chase down your contact info, because at some point they’ll stop and go somewhere else. And you’ll be sad.
4. Pixelated images – No website should ever have pixelated images on their website. No excuses.
5. Not knowing what to do – When visitors come to your site they should understand what to do within the first 10 seconds or less. If a person searches for local car repair shops and clicks on a link, they should be able to find out how to contact the company within one click. Nothing makes a visitor leave your page faster than not finding the information they are looking for. Get into the mind of the user of your site. Figure out all the reasons they might come to your site and try to address them in a way that makes the site functional and pleasing to use.
6. Death to dropdown menus – These pesky little menus will end up costing you a ton on development costs while delivering no value to the experience of your website. In fact, the annoyance factor of difficult-to-navigate menus may decrease the usage of your site, costing you more than you can calculate. Simple, usable menus will always provide the most accessibility and reduce the frustration that users feel when trying to jump around your website.
7. Use your words wisely – You should be treating your homepage as your storefront. Would you clutter the windows packed full of signage, stickers, clever phrases, images, etc.? By cutting down the text on your homepage (and throughout your website), you’ll make the text that’s left even more readable and attention-grabbing. If there’s information overload on your website, there really can’t be any information download.
8. No visual indication of context – It’s easy to assume that every visitor to your website will enter from the homepage and navigate from there, creating an easy-to-follow path. More often than not, visitors will come to specific pages on your website from search engines, meaning they’ll need a quick way of determining exactly where they’ve landed on your website. This could happen in a visual manner with arrows or tab indicators, or it could mean the use of bread crumbs. Either way, it’s important to always tell a website browser where they are now, so they know where to go next.
Comments
Posted by thomas on Aug 05, 2010
hi!
thanks for this - especially for “Death to dropdown menus” - ever thought & said this.
g+
thomas
Posted by Dom on Aug 05, 2010
uuummm…Could have been an intersting article, but I couldn’t read it because your ‘about the author’ box covers the into paragraph. how about that for something that drives people nuts on websites.
Posted by hans on Aug 06, 2010
ha ha doh - ie7 is not your friend
Posted by Gary Millerf on Aug 10, 2010
How about when foreground is nigh on impossible to read - and I’m not visually impaired.
Posted by Kim Stearns on Aug 10, 2010
Thomas: Yes! If dropdowns ceased to exist, the world may, in fact, be a better place.
Dom: Problem solved. It was an error that occurs when using good ol’ Internet Explorer.
Gary: The foreground? Care to elaborate on this?
Posted by Steven on Aug 10, 2010
With images turned off, your site is black text on green background, which is pretty hard to read. That may be what Gary was referring to.
Posted by AdamT on Aug 11, 2010
Ok, unnecessary dropdowns are indeed a waste of time.
However, what if your site has hundreds of links in dozens of categories, possibly four levels deep? This is not a rare circumstance with any kind of large corporate site.
Posted by SEO on Aug 11, 2010
That Post is full of informative. Hope u will share again this kind of stuff with us.
Posted by Kim Stearns on Aug 11, 2010
AdamT: It may make logical sense to use dropdowns, but they drastically reduce the usability of the website by doing so. There’s always another way of going about organizing your information that doesn’t require your users to be experts with their mice.
Posted by Steven on Aug 11, 2010
Dropdown menus can be made more usable by having them initiated by click (rather than hover), having the text and links be large (with much padding), and providing an alternate navigation route (like sidebar navigation and breadcrumbs). But suggesting that all dropdowns make a site less usable is just lazy. Many sites out there would be much more difficult to navigate without them, especially those sites with a deep hierarchy.
Posted by John Faulds on Aug 11, 2010
I agree with Steven: to say that using dropdowns drastically reduces the usability of a website is nonsense (and costing a ton on development costs? :?). To solely rely on dropdowns as a method for reaching subpages is ill-advised but if you offer alternative methods for reaching those pages, then adding a dropdown as well is *enhancing* usability because you’re providing more than one way of accessing the content.
Posted by Lee on Aug 14, 2010
There is no reason to ever use a drop-down menu. None. They’re difficult to use, frustrating, and unnecessary. Think about websites where a lot of time and money was spent making them as usable as possible (Amazon, New York Times come to mind)—they don’t use drop down menus.
Posted by James Archer on Aug 14, 2010
Drop down menus are fantastic for middle-aged individuals with good hand-eye coordination and full use of their vision and arms/hands.
However, when you’ve sat in a usability test watching a 75-year-old woman with poor vision and shaky hands try to navigate a drop-down menu, you’ll quickly understand that they don’t work for everyone.
Likewise, I am frustrated on a regular basis when trying to navigate drop-down menus via my iphone, because they work so poorly in that context.
Web designers have to design for everyone, not just the middle of the curve. 
Posted by Steven on Aug 14, 2010
Amazon makes extensive use of drop-downs, so that’s not really a good example. So does Google, eBay, Microsoft ...
ebay has a good example of a perfectly good drop-down, though. If you hover or click the arrow, you get the drop down. If you click the link, you go to a page with a list of everything in the sitemap. Doubly accessible.
Posted by Lee on Aug 15, 2010
Amazon does not use many, if any, drop downs beyond the home page. eBay’s drop downs are unusable and difficult to read—too many choices, for one thing (many older people I know have loads of trouble with drop downs in general and eBay’s in particular). Google uses them to present a single list of more choices in the two instances where they are used, not to present an array of choices and sub-levels of choices. Microsoft’s website is barely usable—they’ve never gotten navigation right in either their website or their software.
Drop down menu makers seem to forget that not everything available needs to be presented on the same screen—get people to the main area and present sub choices from there.
Most drop down menus are overwhelming, confusing, and badly designed in terms of how long they stay open and how adept the user is at moving a mouse around. They are not worth the trouble to use and even more so not worth the expense of developing them.
Posted by Ira Siegel on Aug 15, 2010
Great tips! I agree w/ the drop down menus - hate ‘em (unless you have a ton of sub nav items of course).
Posted by ptamaro on Aug 16, 2010
Great post! Right to the point and a super selection of eight pertinent pesky pet peeves definitely worth attending to.
Found you via a tweet by Angela (http://twitter.com/AccessForAll)
Nice site, good stuff—thanks…
Posted by Tim on Aug 17, 2010
I suppose if you are new to development drop downs may cost you a “ton on development costs” - but for any well respected developer, drop downs can be done in like 10 minutes. Drop downs is one of those things that works well in some areas, and not others. Meaning, this argument has no end and no right answer. It’s flame bait.
Posted by desinerd on Aug 17, 2010
I don’t see why not to use drop down menus. For a big website (like Amazon), it is very hard to fit everything in navigation bar and drop down menus are a necessity.
Look at BestBuy website for example. It has very simple and very precise drop down menus. If it didn’t would yo be able to accommodate all the items from second level menu in the navigation?
I read one comment above about drop down menus not working with iPhone (because there is no hover state). To solve this issue, we can change the dropdowns to open on click; problem solved!
If we can have drop down menus in software application (like the File, Edit, View menus in Firefox) why can’t we have those in the website?
Posted by LazyAndroid on Aug 17, 2010
How about Mega Dropdown Menues? Jakob Nielsen approves.
Also I don’t see how they cost me “tons on development cost” and they work fine even on my iphone.
Posted by James Archer on Aug 17, 2010
LazyAndroid: I definitely approve of Mega Dropdown menus, but they’re (unfortunately!) so seldom used that I don’t really include those in the debate about dropdown menus. They’re a *lot* more user-friendly than traditional dropdown menus.
desinerd: Once the drop-down menus are set for click rather than hover, they’re no longer offering much advantage over traditional navigation. If it takes three clicks to get to a page, why not dispense with the cumbersome javascript and design the pages to accomodate that kind of navigation. (Also, regarding application drop-down menus: most non-technical software users are barely aware they exist, and seldom use them. There’s a reason well-designed applications tend to use buttons and inline functionality, and avoid using a menu for primary navigation.)
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