Sarah Chapman

Love him or hate him (and useit, his plainer-than-thou website), Jakob Nielsen is a usability deity.

He has the art of assessing the user’s experience of a website down to a fine art and, let’s be honest, when you work with a website on a day-to-day basis and build and structure the content yourself, it’s easy to forget to think about what might be the most intuitive or logical way of presenting things for your audience.

In his latest (but rather unimaginatively titled) post, Four Bad Designs, Nielsen describes and analyses “a modest harvest of design stupidities” he has been unfortunate enough to encounter.

Amongst these disastrous designs are a pretty but frightfully contentless entertainment website, some pretty useless ‘splash pages’ from a chocolatier, a nasty 3D interface from a bicycle business and some pages from the New York Times which lack ‘information scent’.

Take a look at the full article for lots of points that are so obviously common sense that, in a bid to make an attractive site, you might just let slip.

And then tell me whether, genuinely, you think Nielsen’s useit site is attractive.

The blogosphere speaks:

• On the bad content example: “Without incentive, there’s no reason to care about the call to action.”
• More on the bad content example: “The good Dr poses the age-old question: “Where’s the beef!?”
• On the cost of bad design: “If they improved the content, they could increase sales from the site fivefold.”