10 common usability mistakes by web designers

There are million of web pages offering useful information, products and services. But a majority of them are difficult for the user to use and ultimately doesn’t attract the your to stick with the website. As a professional web designer you should take a visitors interests and need while designing the website.

This blog posts presents 10 important common usability mistakes by a web designer.

1) Formatting linking text – An anchor text link is format with an underline which makes the user it is a clickable text. The current trend among web designers to make the remove the underline text decoration can make unnecessary confusion with the end user.

2) High contrast text on a light background – Another design trend which I have noticed lately among the designers to present a light text color like grey on a white background, this practice make vast majority of the users won’t be able to read what it is displayed.

3) Cluttered text – Another common mistake what I see in some websites are how the text is presented within the layout of the site with cluttering of the text. Remember the amount of time your get the visitor to impress is limited if the text is cluttered and make it difficult for the users. The best practice should be to have a fine balance of white space and text which increase readability and message mentioned on the website is easy to scan.

4) Confused navigation – It seems that many designers try to make new method of site navigation. Navigation should be clear and consistent through the all the pages. If you are using image and DHTML navigation make sure that you have a text link at the footer of the page.

5) Logo Consistency – Often this part is neglected most of the designers. The logo should be consistent through out the page and should have a hyper link to the home page.

6) Browsers – The layout of the website should be compatible with all version and different kind of browsers. Most of the web surfers have lower version of different browsers so make it compatible with all of them.

7) Online Order – Make the ordering process simple and faster, don’t make the visitor frustrated asking to do so many steps before they buy the product. If you can reduce the steps in the buying process it will increase the conversion of the site as well.

8 ) Bread Crumbs – Is a very type of navigation which will tell the users where they are currently located on the website architecture. Some sites ignore this accessibility issue and make the users lost inside a website without knowing where to go.

9) Loading time – Due to the over use of big graphics and other programs and multimedia like applets, flash files and videos elements can reduce the loading time of the website which make the visitor to leave immediately and your site will have a higher bounce rate.

10) Surprising the visitor – Most of the users are not comfortable with unexpected things occurring while they surf the web page like automated downloads and video and audio without the permission of the user.

The bottom-line is many, many sites are neglect the basic principles of a website design which mean the user is wasting time as they are looking inside the site trying to make some sense of its purpose.