Common Usability Mistakes

There are a couple of things I disagree with.<p>Colours have very different meanings depending on where the culture. The go-to example is how red is percieved in the U.S. (danger/bad) versus China (happiness/luck).<p>With regards to website names in titles, URLs aren't displayed in some history lists. It's also important to remember the sizable chunk of the population that Googles everything and has no idea how to read a URL.

I think one of the most loathsome and ubiquitous UI sins is the "show more" style of navigation, where some ajaxy cruft goes and makes the page longer, propagated with more data. Paginated navigation (ex: flickr) is much friendlier and lends itself well to digging deep into the past whereas services such as Twitter, Brightkite, facebook and the like have practically solidified their role as platforms for ephemeral and trite chatter with one simple UI decision.

1) Good idea. Tangent: a token would NOT prevent a dictionary attack. It is pretty simple to mimic the functionality of a web browser using server side code including grabbing whatever token the web browser should be passing back. Doesn't mean you should not persist data though.<p>2) ...that dotted line is so ugly...but fine<p>5) html maxlength attribute? maybe this is too web 1.0 for some people<p>8) ...ut if you do not prefix your title with, por ejemplo, BBC then BBC bookmarks will be mixed with others. At least this way when sorted alphabetically bookmarks from the same domain will be grouped together and even sorted correctly amongst themselves.

As for #1, there's a good reason why login forms <i>shouldn't</i> persist form state: it leaks information. Showing the successful username leaks information that that username exists. It also is a subtle, possibly incorrect, hint that the user typed <i>their</i> username correctly. It is just as likely that the user typed their username wrong, and as the number of users go up, the chance of a one or two character difference between usernames is increased. If the username field is filled in, users might realize that they entered it wrong and won't fix it, but rather just retype the password, the wrong password for the account given.

Pluralizing everything with an apostrophe isn't a usability problem, but boy does this article do it a lot.

&#62;2) Forgetting tab index<p>Is that necessary with a properly structured form?

I'd quibble a bit with #8, page titles. In my experience users rarely if ever look at the page titles in the browser; they don't really impact usability.<p>If titles are important, pages should have a title banner or heading <i>in</i> the page itself, and not rely on users looking at the title up at the top of the browser window.

Microsoft hired 111 Psychologists since 2001 to improve its Software Usability <a href="http://www.myvisajobs.com/H1B-Visa-045-2009-SO.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.myvisajobs.com/H1B-Visa-045-2009-SO.htm</a>

The last tip should be the first. I'd also add UI testing on real users - not doing so is a common mistake!