Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
Links are key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past. Most important, knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next.These benefits only accrue less than one important assumption: those users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don’t change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.
Page Titles with Low Search Engine Visibility
The page title is contained within the HTML <title> tag and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERP). Search engines typically show the first 66 characters or so of the title, so it’s truly micro content.
Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
Opening New Browser Windows
Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet.
User who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a Links that don’t behave as expected undermine users’ understanding of their own system.
When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser’s “open in new window” command — assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser’s standard behavior.
PDF Files for Online Reading
Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.
PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.
Fixed Font Size
CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser’s “change font size” button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40. Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms — not as an absolute number of pixels.
Browser Incompatibility
As we all know it is a huge world and there are many browsers available nowadays. So you cannot figure out who is going to use which browser to view the web pages created by designers and we cannot restrict them to view the web page in particular browser.
So while designing any web page take care that that is compatible and viewable correctly on all browsers.
No Contact Information or call of action
Even though phone numbers and email addresses are the most requested forms of contact info, having a physical mailing address on the site might be more important because it’s one of the key credibility markers. A company with no address is not one you want to give money to. For advice on how to best present contact info, see our usability studies of “About Us” pages and store finders and locators.
Horizontal Scrolling
Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 1024×768 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 1024-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little relative to the annoyance of horizontal scrolling.
Users hate scrolling left to right. Vertical scrolling seems to be okay, maybe because it’s much more common.
Mailto Links in Unexpected Locations
Take care while using mailto links because it allows you to connect user to the mail client software to mail to the email id in which you have use the mailto function.
If you have use mailto on the word which does not reflect the user that this particular word have mail script then in this scenario all your efforts goes into vain.
Bad Search
Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
Search is the user’s lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that’s what users are looking for.
