Doom Your App

Saturday April 19th, 2008

My fellow countryman Jakob Nielsen's work for improving the user experience - both on the web and other places - is notably and have a huge beneficial effect for us all. So thank you for that.

I've never read any of his books, lengthy studies or attended some of the many seminars and courses in where he and his colleagues at Nielsen Norman Group practice the world of user experience.

But I do occasionally read his excellent Alert Box - a bi-weekly blog on usability issues.

For example this one Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes from February 19, 2008. It contains a lot of goodies for us product managers.

No one should be allowed to work on an application unless they've spent a day observing a few end users.

I briefly lists his top-10 mistakes just so that we know them - but read the details yourself:

1. Non-standard GUI controls.
2. Inconsistency (e.g. using difference verbs for the same commands).
3. No perceived affordance (e.g. users says "what can I do here?")
4. No feedback (system state, progress, what's happening)
5. Bad error messages (please explain why and how to fix - teach the user)
6. Asking for the same information twice.
7. No default values.
8. Dumping users into the application.
9. Not indicating how information will be used.
10. System centric features (rather than a user centric understanding)