Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

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.