
Web Usability Blunders That Still Piss Me Off - pclark
http://www.snipe.net/2009/01/usability-blunders-that-still-piss-me-off/
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tom_rath
Looks like he forgot "Don't put textured background behind site content".

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Megasumo
I am sorry -but your site could also be considered a Usability blunder. Will
not go over too many issues I have but for instance having the link text one
shade darker then primary color is considered bad.

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illicium
I can't believe he used the stock Photoshop blue-brown landscape gradient for
his site logo. Ugh.

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Jebdm
I agree with most of his points, but two of them seem a little off to me.

STOP underlining text that isn’t a LINK - There are a lot of places where
underlining makes sense. If you've got the links in a different color, then it
shouldn't be an issue; besides, after one click users will figure it out
(please don't tell me this isn't true or I'll lose all faith in humanity).

I still really hate dynamic dropdown menus. A lot. - Sometimes they make
sense. They probably shouldn't be part of your main navigation, but they work
well for things like country and state/province selectors. Remember to have it
degrade gracefully, though.

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xiaoma
I agree about underlined text, and I found one other glaring error:

 _At first glance, this makes perfect sense - except for the fact that not
everyone visiting your website will be English-speaking, and the word for
“information” doesn’t start with an “i” in every language._

Visitors to my sites written in English will be English speaking. Either that,
or they'll face much more pressing problems than how I abbreviate the word
"information".

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bd
One extremely annoying thing that is rarely mentioned is very very slow scroll
speed.

I think it may have something to do with background images and/or
transparency.

Even some quite prominent sites suffer from this flaw (making them almost
unusable for me):

<http://ajaxian.com>

<http://jayisgames.com>

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ivank
This is barely noticeable on faster computers, so many designers miss this.
The browser has to re-draw the whole page because some of it scrolls, yet the
static background doesn't.

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bd
That's it.

Now I realized I have seen a naturally occurring test case: Twitter user pages
with and without static background images. Everything else is the same, yet
the ones with the static background image (CSS => background-attachment:fixed)
are much slower.

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xiaoma
My personal pet peeve is when sites don't resize gracefully. Text should wrap,
rather than float off the left side of the browser. Many sites, including this
one, are unreadable at a width of 500 pixels, which is my preferred reading
width.

Having to use the FF web developer addon to disable CSS on page after page
gets old.

