Sep 19 - Nielsen, Four Bad Designs (Alertbox)

Four Bad Designs

Summary: Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.

Bad Content: Jazz at Lincoln Center

Here's the information I found about a Jazz at Lincoln Center performance:
What information? The site provides the musicians' names and a photo of the lead trombonist. That's it. No player biographies, no description of the type of jazz they play, no quotations from reviews, no links to independent reviews, no audio clips so you could actually hear the band.
On the page above, however, there's simply a hopeful request (in big letters) that you'll "make a reservation" without knowing anything about the concert. Not likely, unless you're already well acquainted with the band.

Links without Information Scent: New York Times

Who'd want to click on "Next Article in Business"? Maybe a few more people than the eager audience for "article 19," but not many.
I thought I'd seen the end of offering links to articles with no information beyond their number — a design I panned in my review of Slate.com 12 years ago. Links need information scent to help people determine what they'll get if they click. People don't have time to click on everything.

Interior Splash Pages: Christopher Norman Chocolates

When you select a category from the main navigation menu, you don't get a page listing the corresponding products. Instead, you get a splash screen, like this one for "Geometrics & Fruits."
Splash screens are bad enough when they sit in front of a site's real homepage, but at least users encounter those screens only once. With a splash screen for every category, users have to click through many extra pages to see all the products.

Metaphor Run Amok: Specialized Bicycles

3D navigation is almost always bad. It's harder to manipulate, it doesn't show the choices as well as a 2D interface, and it tends to be slower to use.
Metaphors sometimes make a user interface easier to learn because they let users transfer their existing knowledge from the reference domain.
Websites that use metaphors almost always go way overboard and end up reducing usability. It's as if the metaphor becomes an evil attraction that diverts the design team's attention from the actual content it's supposed to communicate.

My Comments: Lousy design and poor usability would cause the website to be ineffective. That eventually would mean less sales resulting from the website if it is an e-commerce website.

The Business Cost of Bad Design

How much do these bad design ideas cost the site owners?

The New York Times is probably losing the least money; most users will simply skip the no-scent link. At the same time, of course, the generic link has an opportunity cost: in its place, the newspaper could offer a link to content that's closely related to the current article. People who actually read to the end of the page would be quite likely to click the link. The site could thus gain maybe 2–5% more pageviews through better use of that space.

My bet for biggest business loss is the content-poor jazz page. Our user testing of product pages shows that people are much more likely to buy when a page answers their questions about its offerings. With virtually no information, it's pretty much guaranteed that this Jazz at Lincoln Center page only closes the sale for strongly committed fans who would attend any performance with Wycliffe Gordon.

My guess is that, by adding more information, the site could sell at least 5 times as many tickets to non-fans. In studying the ROI of usability improvements, we sometimes find a sales increase of 1,000% or more.
So, adding meaningful content might even make this page a tenbagger for non-fanatical customers. How much the overall sales would increase depends on the ratio between the rabid adherents of this artist and the people who simply like some jazz from time to time. My guess is that the second group is so much larger that better content would make sales explode.

The last two sites are an intermediate case. For large sites, offering awkward navigation is a prescription for doom: users wouldn't stand for interstitial splash pages or bloated metaphors if they had to find their way through 10,000 products or more.
But when dealing with just a handful of products — like those offered by Christopher Norman and Specialized — motivated users can overcome bad navigation.

Of course, less motivated users will leave the first time they get even a bit lost. Bad design costs a company money, no matter how small the site.

source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 14, 2008:
Four Bad Designs
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html
Four Bad Web Designs (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)