Usability Blunders

Smashing Magazine has a decent article on 9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design. I must say we've seen these mistakes time and time again on projects we're called in to provide usability consulting on. In essence, they're all just common sense, and fall back on our two main design principles:

• Don't make people think


• Keep everything within two clicks

There was, however, one point we disagreed on a bit in our office: the structure of page titles. These show in both the title bar of the browser window, and also within search engine results pages (SERPs). The article suggests placing the title of the page first, then the brand associated with the site. Instead, we follow a 'you are HERE' approach - titles should read left to right much like breadcrumbs. For example, a title we would create might look like this:

NovelProjects -> About Us -> Employment Opportunities

In our opinion, that tells the user where they are within the site, allowing them to more intuitively navigate up or down levels of depth within the content. This is even more important on e-commerce websites, where a page title for a product page should appear as follows:

AudioSavings.com -> Car Audio -> Amplifiers -> Rockford Fosgate

You can see this in action on www.AudioSavings.com, the most recent e-commerce site we've launched.

That's my two cents. Call me if you want the whole nickel.