Sunday, January 21, 2007

My first thought is that this guy needs to take some tech writing classes. He needs to distinguish between regular text and special terms by highlighting or italicizing them. The third paragraph in the first section (Bad search) is a bit confusing because the sentence starts with the word "search" which is being used as a noun and not as a verb. It was a bit of a stumble for me. I found this interesting because he's preaching about usability, and this seemed incongruous.

I like this point: "A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it's the culmination of your journey." It makes sense, and really evokes the notion of a world wide web and of the concept/layout of a website. It also evokes the notion of "searching" which is what people are usually doing when they're on the internet.

Here are some samples:
http://www.eopd.com/
This web site, for a police department, is too much about the animation, which makes it look like an advertisement (Mistake #7)

http://www.customhousenumbers.com/
This web site, ironically, doesn't allow users to adjust the font size (except for the toolbar). Do they think that old people may not want to buy custom house numbers?

I got these two websites from this website: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/, which is one person's personal attack on bad web design. Enjoy!

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