Web Directions

Some years ago I had the priv­i­lege to see Sir Tim Berners-​​lee speak at WWW2005 in Japan. One of the things which stayed with me was his strong empha­sis on the word “user” in the term “user agent”. In par­tic­u­lar he made men­tion of pop up ads, and how these vio­lated the intrin­sic con­tract of the web — that the user is on con­trol of their experience.

Those of us who use the web a lot will prob­a­bly come across quite a num­ber of these kinds of annoy­ances — where the designer of a site makes deci­sions that should be left in the hands of the user.

A few which spring to mind are

• Any kind of splash page (bonus demerit points for a non HTML splash page) — I’m here already, don’t waste my time!
• Links which open in new win­dows. Extra bonus points where you use JavaScript to open a new win­dow even when I choose to open in a new tab.

Changing the size of my win­dow, and adding or remov­ing tool­bars. That really irri­tates me.

• Content I can’t command-​​f find. That’s right folks, text is text. I don’t give one met­ric fig for image replace­ment techniques.

What major irri­ta­tions do web sites cause you when using the web? Let’s build a list of things we’d love to see web sites never do again.

4 responses to “Top user experience annoyances”:

1. • By:Cheryl
   • May 27th, 2008
   

   OTP ads (over the page) — you know those annoy­ing as hell ones that the SMH and other news sites use? Once the page loads, you’re hap­pily read­ing away when an offen­sive ad (usu­ally with sound) takes over the whole screen and only has a tiny 2x2 pixel “close” but­ton so you’re cap­tive for 15 sec­onds — and if you miss the close but­ton you’re taken to the splash page for the ad.

   In my evil days of work­ing in online adver­tis­ing (sorry!) every­one always went off about how effec­tive they are — I kept argu­ing they were only effec­tive as the click­throughs were peo­ple like me look­ing for the close but­ton but unfor­tu­nately for me they were actu­ally effec­tive — peo­ple went through to purchase.

   Sound is another big one. I hate hate hate it. Don’t auto­mat­i­cally assume I want sound effects or music or what­ever else you’re using to funk up your site.

2. • By:john
   • May 27th, 2008
   

   Excellent sug­ges­tions Cheryl! Sound is HUGE one for sure, and of course, the rea­son why ads are increas­ingly intru­sive is — wait for it — no one wants to see them. Now of course, ads can work — after all, Google’s rev­enue is essen­tially all ads — but they make intel­li­gent deci­sions about where to put those ads.

3. • By:maxine
   • May 27th, 2008
   

   Yeah, sound is prob­a­bly my num­ber 1. If I am hear­ing sound when I haven’t just clicked to play a video or audio track .….. I am reach­ing for the close button.

   Anything that scrolls in Flash always sucks. It goes too fast, it goes to slow, I have no idea where I am. Yuck. My browser has a per­fectly good scroll bar with whom I have a very good rela­tion­ship — why mess with that?

4. • By:Leah Maclean
   • May 28th, 2008
   

   My big hates are auto sound and the Over The Page ads. Also hate the splash page where you have to wait for it to load and there’s no way to skip their lovely piece of brand­ing — I want infor­ma­tion not proof that the designer is very clever.

Your opinion: