Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

Jeff Johnson

May 2003 · Elsevier

About this ebook

The dot.com crash of 2000 was a wake-up call, and told us that the Web has far to go before achieving the acceptance predicted for it in '95. A large part of what is missing is quality; a primary component of the missing quality is usability. The Web is not nearly as easy to use as it needs to be for the average person to rely on it for everyday information, commerce, and entertainment.In response to strong feedback from readers of GUI BLOOPERS calling for a book devoted exclusively to Web design bloopers, Jeff Johnson calls attention to the most frequently occurring and annoying design bloopers from real web sites he has worked on or researched. Not just a critique of these bloopers and their sites, this book shows how to correct or avoid the blooper and gives a detailed analysis of each design problem. Hear Jeff Johnson's interview podcast on software and website usability at the University of Canterbury (25 min.) - Discusses in detail 60 of the most common and critical web design mistakes, along with the solutions, challenges, and tradeoffs associated with them. - Covers important subject areas such as: content, task-support, navigation, forms, searches, writing, link appearance, and graphic design and layout. - Organized and formatted based on the results of its own usability test performed by web designers themselves. - Features its own web site (www.web-bloopers.com)with new and emerging web design no-no's (because new bloopers are born every day) along with a much requested printable blooper checklist for web designers and developers to use.

About the author

Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).