5 Web Designs To Annoy The Senses: Bad User Interface Design - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

One of the most celebrated sciences of web design is without a doubt, usability. User interface design can very well determine the success and lifespan of a website. Without a well-structured and organised website design, you may as well go back to the days of business cards and xerox to sell your business.

Information architecture and design forms the crux of any online business portal. Why? Because the design of your website will play a primary role in whether your customer came, saw, puked and left – or alternatively – stayed a while, browsed, engaged and perhaps bought something.

Good website design is everything.

On a myriad number of occasions, I’ve been trawling the world wide web searching for a product or service with an immense hunger for a website that is well structured towards meeting my requirements. It just so happens that my mind is ravenous for information of use to me, and all I seem to encounter is a cluttered mess of information, a calamity of keywords and links, a website that looks like a dog’s dinner.

It sounds harsh, right? Well, not in my opinion. The way I see it, it is the duty of every business owner to invest in good website design that not only sells the organisation well, but caters instantly to what the user is searching for without them having to sift through the ancient catacombs of lost static pages just to find anything of topical relevance.

Nothing annoys me more, and I’m sure you feel the same!

I thought that I’d take this opportunity to discuss 10 pitfalls of website design that never cease to have users scamper desperately for the ‘back’ button:

1. The website drawn in crayon and coded – for this one, you’re probably going to start laughing as soon as you see the screen shot. Sadly though, even in the futuristic year of 2010, many web masters still opt for the website design that causes a seizure upon opening. The following is a screenshot of a website for a prestigious educational institution in America, but the presentation is completely paradox. Without making any remarks regarding the navigation, the usability is null and void given the solar flare of colours.Nothing annoys me more than a website that makes me not only have to wear shades to look at my screen, but also makes me feel like my head is going to pop in the impending threat of a seizure. It’s like a scene out of Total Recall:

   

2. The 90s – good music, good TV, bad websites – I know that everyone needs to make an exception towards businesses who don’t have the time to update their web design with something a little more contemporary, but then again, what about governments? Nothing drives me crazy like an ‘informational’ website that’s still stuck in the 90s. I mean, look at North Korea, they can build nuclear weapons nowadays but can’t build a decent user interface? Come on guys…Don’t worry though, Iceland have got decent UI design covered…

   

3. Websites that go overboard with SEO – It has always been said, in order for SEO to be successful, at the end of the day you still need people to engage and interact with your website content once they’ve clicked onto one of your landing pages. Usability and SEO are difficult to balance, but there is a line you should never cross. Truth be told, nothing makes me abort from a web page faster than something like this:Ummm… Do you think that they sell flashlights? It’s almost so overwhelming that I actually forgot where I was for a moment there – easily one of the worst eCommerce web designs that I have ever seen. Want an Australian example? Without naming names, here’s the bottom half of the home page of one of the most popular digital camera stores in the market:

   

   The fact that the website design is so bad makes me never want to shop here. Very successful SEO, though!

4. Websites that seemingly scroll infinitely – Is it really necessary for me to scroll for eons and eons just to reach the end of a sentence? I know, I’ll just get in my car and drive my eyes to the other end of my 2.47km LCD computer screen… Or I’ll just leave instead. Make your content easy to skim over! Before you say anything, yes, this was Nintendo.com’s website once upon a time… The scrollbar = nearly as epic as the legend of Zelda!Want to know something ironic? Since updating in 2010, Google Images now deploys the infinite scroll function (vertically). They do it in a much more user-friendly fashion of course…

   

5. Blank palettes – These websites always seem like a) they’re too cool for information architecture b) don’t want to disclose anything to their users c) are just out to drive you mad with abysmal proportions of blank space or d) all above the above.You guessed it, they’re out to do all three. The below screen shot is one from the website of one of my favourite underground bands. They’re actually a pretty big band in Finland, but they’ve only got two links on the entire website. It doesn’t do much to promote them for the user, does it?

That’s about all I’ve got in me for the time being, but you get the picture, and hopefully you had a bit of a laugh too. I think that I have illustrated my point pretty well, without good website design, your online campaign will be dismal.

Good website design can work wonders for your company’s image, so why not make the most of your online asset and turn it into something alluring and captivating? After all, if you invest valuable time into website development, user interface design and information architecture, your customers will invest their time into engaging and interacting with your website.

What are your thoughts on the importance of good website design?

Website accounts in shopping carts are common things these days. It is not often that you will come across a e-commerce store that does not offer an account of some type with which you can register, in order to get added benefits. In fact many e-commerce websites make registration mandatory in order to even purchase, which is a hot topic and one which I have touched on in a older post.

As I see it, if you do offer an account with your e-commerce store, the goal would be to have as many of your users register for one as possible. Users who are registered are far more likely to make a purchase, and assuming you gained permission to send them email you can use this to promote new products and or services.

One thing I see common across even some leading e-commerce stores is the poor attempt to sell registration to the user. If you offer registration, whats so good about it? What do you get if you do register and why must the user do it? All these questions should be answered on your account sign-up page.

Take pcparts.net.au as a perfect example – their login page has only a couple of lines of text to promote the creation of an account. At this point in time as a user I have no idea what I get if you sign up so I will be very declined to do so.

pcparts.net.au

If your going to ask a user to not only give up their precious time, but provide personal information such as their email address, you have to offer in return something of equal or greater value.

These days, there are many shopping carts available for purchase, and open source CMS’s that come with a set number of features available to use. These features range from product reviews, to discount pricing, wish lists, and so on.

What you will find, for example is if you take a hand full of ecommerce shopping carts, all from completely different industry’s but that use the same shopping cart, there is a good chance that they will have many of the same features. Now this may sound normal, however what I am finding more and more is that certain things work for certain industries, while other things don’t. I have found that implementing a feature on one web site can have outstanding results, but putting that same feature in a different web site wont really get results at all.

The reason for this is every industry is different, people looking to buy a house on the internet don’t really interact and behave how someone who is trying to buy a second hand couch does. When you are designing a web site or planning new features, you must do your research and find out how your customers behave. If you take the time to do this initially, you will find you will save yourself a lot of time and money in the long run.