After assessing many web sites, reporting on their faults and advising on what to fix, I have arrived at a list of the most common problems I encounter.

My web site assessments are effectively mini Heuristic Evaluations where a site is tested for usability problems against a list of known issues. The bottom line is that many web sites are fundamentally flawed, alienating or turning away countless users. Many of the problems I see can be easily fixed and some, well, some of the faults we find simply beggar belief.

To cut to the chase, here are ten of the most common faults I find:

  1. Poor text readability: font size too small, poor contrast with background, bad use of colour
    For most web sites, textual content is the main reason why people visit a site. If the text isn’t readable, the site is almost hiding it’s main reason for existing.
  2. Poor sense of orientation or little indication of where you are within the site
    As users navigate through a site, particularly if there is a lot of content organised in a hierarchy, they need to know approximately where they are within the site, have some indication of how they got there and where they can go next. A good sense of orientation is vital to the overall user experience.
  3. Main logo not linked to home page
    Having a main site or company logo link back to the home page is an important and universally understood navigation device which users often resort to if they get lost and want to go back to the start. Even if there is a button labelled ‘home’, users will often click on the main site logo almost as an instinctive reaction.
  4. Bad use of hyperlinks: link text, colour, duplicate links
    Many users jump from link to link when scanning a page or looking for information. When they do this, typically the link text is read, not the surrounding text. Therefore, it is important that link text makes sense when not contextualized by the words around it. ‘Click here’ is particularly bad. Unvisited/visited link colours should be appropriate and different.
  5. No product comparison
    One very common goal for users who are researching products on the Internet is to compare key features of similar products side by side, without having to juggle multiple windows or print out pages. Comparison tables showing key characteristics are extremely useful for helping users achieve product selection goals.
  6. Form problems, a wide assortment of
    Select from a menu of problems, including: no use of label tags, email field too short, bad tab order, overly strict validation, ambiguous checkbox/radio button layout, javascript dependency, presence of a reset button. Most bad forms combine an interesting selection of different problems.
  7. Small ‘click zones’
    Usability improves significantly as clickable ‘hotzones’ increase in size. Make it easy for users to click on something without having to position the mouse pointer carefully and accurately over a small active zone.
  8. No site map
    Even with the best navigation and content structure, users will sometimes need to resort to a site map to help them find what they are looking for. Sitemaps can also help users to visualise the structure of the entire site, at a glance.
  9. Ineffective or non-existent site search
    Users can quickly give up navigating to find the information they are looking for. Providing a search facility gives people a catch all method of locating that difficult to find content. Search problems ranged from simple searches not returning results for pages which did exist, right through to getting too many non-relevant results.
  10. Poor SEO: weak page titles, bad META data, no deep linking, etc.
     If people can’t find your site, you’re wasting your time!

That was my top ten most frequently encountered usability problems and there are many more which nearly made the list.

Bruce Tognazzini’s article, First Principles of Interaction Design, gives you some idea of the issues we need to consider when testing a web site.