by Bradley Hebdon.

We’ve come a long way on the web today. Or have we?  While we’ve innovated in many areas, we’ve also continued to disregard pre-existing issues. And in some cases, we have also created new ones. Here is my list of the top 65 most annoying things about the web today. They’re in no particular order, but I have organized them into what I consider core groups.

Using the Web can still be a very annoying experience!

Poor Design

1. Illegible text. I can’t read that, it’s too small. And what on earth is that font called?
2. Busy backgrounds.  Oh MySpace, why do you allow users to create profiles like that? My eyes hurt.
3. Obscure links. I’m confused, can I click on that or not? Oh I get it, you don’t want me to view other pages.
4. Flyouts that are too large. Holy crap Yahoo!  This is a page within a flyout!
5. Drop-down menu navigation too many levels deep. OK, if I slowly move my mouse this way first… dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a magician!
6. Complicated navigation. I just want to get to that page, the one over there! Oh I see, you want me to complete the maze first.
7. Abused centerpieces. Aren’t centerpieces supposed to serve as mechanisms for promotion, rather than areas to cram an entire page’s worth of content into itself? Call me an idealist, I guess.
8. Poor navigation labels. Give me a clue and use labels that make sense!
9. Clutter & chaos. With no emphasis or information hierarchy, it’s difficult for me to know what to look at, and what to do next.
10. Ugly WAPs. Many companies treat their WAP sites like a deformed step-child they keep in the basement.
11. Splash screens. Nice, a road block between your user and your home page.

Unfindable Information

1. Dysfunctional site search. (Sigh) Why didn’t this site just use Google?
2. Too many blog categories. Isn’t this what tags were meant for?
3. Contact info. I just want to speak to them on the phone! And when I say “them” i mean a human.
4. Invisible sign in. OK, so I registered, but how do I sign in?
5. Hidden account closure. I guess I’m a member for life now?
6. Unscannable info. I want to quickly know if this article is relevant. But alas, huge paragraphs, long headlines and no subheadings make for an unscannable chunk of data, and an indigestible piece of gristle.

No Content Strategy

1. No focus. Yada, yada, yada. Get to the point, what’s your message and what do you offer?
2. Spelling & grammar. Spelling mistakes are hard to forgive and really hurt credibility.
3. Ineffective product pages: What am I buying? Why should I buy this? Help me understand, and I’ll move down the purchase funnel!
4. Outdated. There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing a blog frozen in time. At some point, a landfill for websites is going to be needed.
5. Small photos. Why would I buy something I cannot see?

Auto-Behavior

1. Auto-playing home page video. Take note ESPN.com: the first thing I do when coming to your site is scramble to find the video pause button. And that’s when I’m surfing from home.
2. Auto browser resizing. And you did that because?
3. Customer service nags. Ironic really. Chat pop-ups appear like genies out of a lamp when I don’t need them.
4. Theme tunes. Got to love that auto-play music, especially when it cycles over and over and over, and over.
5. Auto opt-ins. It seems like an automatic opt-in is a contradiction in terms to me. No I don’t want your newsletter, and if I did, I’d opt-in.

Evil Forms

1. Unreadable captchas. Pure Evil. If I had a brick, why I would…
2. Too many fields. This is utterly exhausting. Oh forget it, I’m going to abandon this form.
3. Cryptic error messaging. OK, so I made a mistake. If you used English, I might be able to fix it.
4. No confirmation. Was I successful or not? I’m looking for anything here, a “thank-you”, a “job well done”, a “good boy”… anything that confirms the form was indeed a submitted form.
5. Too many constraints. I want to add my Canadian zip code, but you’re validating against the US format only!
6. Too small fields. How I’m supposed to enter my street address in that state-sized field?
7. The reset button. Do we really need this? I especially love it when I accidentally press “reset” instead of “submit”. It’s especially satisfying when it’s a long form.

Intrusive Advertising

1. Pop-ups. And that includes those fancy, flashy, moving, hard-to-close ones. Are you serious? This is 2009.
2. Interstitials. Thanks for adding another click and creating a barrier between me and your content! Give me a reason to leave, I dare you.
3. Flyouts via links in content. Oh darn, I didn’t know that was an ad! Thanks for punishing me.
4. Too many Google ads. I know there’s some content around here….
5. Long video pre-rolls. Is this ad ever going to end? Hang on; I forgot what video I clicked on.
6. The bus stop. Home pages that resemble bus stops — flyers, posters, graffiti all shouting at me. Sometimes, I swear I can even smell urine.

Accounts

1. Remembering user names and passwords. Seriously, how many do I need to keep track of? Just give me Facebook connect already!
2. Being forced to register for purchases. I just want to buy it, OK? Forget it, I’m going elsewhere.
3. Forced password reset. I just want to know my password! The one I chose but have forgotten. I know you know.
4. Getting locked out. I get the three-attempts-and-you’re-out idea, but it would be nice to know the rules before hand!
5. Password sent by “snail mail”. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Should I expect a scroll to be delivered and read by a messenger?

Abuse

1. Spam. We still cannot cure this disease?
2. Viruses. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d say the anti-virus companies were creating these. You know, supply and demand and all.
3. Phishing. Particularly sneaky; and definitely a step beyond annoying.
4. Trolls on messageboards/blogs. Oh well, that’s life I guess – art imitating life and all.
5. Fake profiles. Am I following the real Steven Hawking on Twitter? It says here he went bowling last night.
6. Facebook app invitations. For the thousandth time, no I do not want to play Mob Wars, and no I don’t want a “pet in an egg” either.

Technology

1. Explorer 6. I speak for all developers here, if there’s a plug attached, please pull it. RIP Explorer 6.
2. Plug-ins. Not only do I have to download another plug-in, I have to keep these things current!
3. Entire sites built in flash. I don’t get it, why?
4. PDF overuse. Why couldn’t this PDF just be a web page?
5. Dell’s Netbook trackpad. Designed to be web browsing device, Dell’s Mini 10 trackpad has a trillion bells and whistles, but cannot fulfill basic tasks like moving the cursor from point A to point B without going to C first.
6. Small netbook screens. While mobile devices have optimized views for their screens, Netbooks and their 9 and 10 inch screens are caught in a weird place.
7. Inconsistent colors. Optimizing colors and contrast across both Macs and PCs is a designers nightmare.
8. Charging for Wi-Fi. Provide it free of charge, and the patrons will come!

Waiting

1. Slow page load. OK that’s it, I’ve been patient and their 3 seconds are up.
2. Comment approval. I thought, I articulated, I commented, I waited. Nothing.  That will teach me to contribute.
3. Black-hole between ordering and shipping. I took me 5 minutes to order this laptop, why isn’t it getting shipped? Should I place my order again? Should I cancel this order? What’s the order status?
4. Twitter is down again. I’m starting to think this is a feature. One akin to a long line outside a trendy night club.
5. Customer service. Since I cannot get a human on the phone, a 24 hour response time to my e-mail is not acceptable. Well look at that, I guess you just quantified the value of my business.
6. Submission timers. I saw this really great article! I know, I’ll post it on Reddit. And there’s another one, I’ll post that on Reddit too. What, I have to wait 10 minutes to post another article? That will  teach me to contribute.

The main job of a banner, oddly enough, is to take the users somewhere they probably weren’t planning on going. That is, to steer them from what they are actually looking for in the site.

To that end, banners must be compelling. A successful banner explores the fact that people tend to focus on answers without really defining the questions.

The main job of a banner is to take the users somewhere they weren’t planning on going

That’s why some issues must be considered when creating banners. Three of them are essential.

Appeal. First of all, banners must be visible. They have to stand out from their surroundings.

Allure. After drawing the users’ attention, you also have to spark their interest. The message must be convincing, and the design must inspire that trust.

Recognition. Building an image is vital in distinguishing oneself from the competition and in generating reliability.

We must bring the message into the users’ cognitive model, so that they not only see the banner, but also take notice of it. Banners should be approached as a communicative tool, and not mere “little boxes” where we stack all the information we wish to convey to the users.

It is of great help to mind a few basic aspects, such as choosing the appropriate site for the placement of the banner, thus enhancing its potential within the desired target audience. Identify beforehand the environment in which the banner will be placed and make sure it will be visible in the site’s general context.

The message must be clear, short and generate an action by the user – don’t try to convey too much, make the banner and its destination page work together. Use the banner as bait to trigger the users’ curiosity.

Special effects, blinking letters and loud colors become a huge “visual noise” when ill-employed, hindering communication. Those elements often thin out the message, detaching us from it.

However, in visual communications, content is never dissociated from form. They are basic, intrinsic components. As we have a good idea, we are able to control only three of the existing elements in the visual communication process: design, content and form. In order to make it a really good idea, we must rely on a fourth element: the audience.

Perception – or the ability to organize the visual information detected – depends on natural processes, on the needs and propensities of the human nervous system.

Understanding how our audience manages such perception is ultimately the key element in creating a thoroughly effective banner.

More…“Were it a case of agnosia, the patient would see now what he had always seen, that is, he would not have suffered any decrease in his visual acuity; the brain would have simply become unable to recognize a chair where there was one… it would have lost the ability to know it knew…”

We tend to believe the visual world is brought to us by the mere information reaching our eyes.

In his book “An Essay on Blindness”, José Saramago mentions the existence of that unusual visual condition which, despite being associated to the eyes, is in fact a neurological disorder.

We tend to believe the visual world is brought to us by the mere information reaching our eyes. However, any knowledge of the world around us implies assigning meaning, or in other words, everything presented to us must be interpreted. Such assignment of meaning requires converting insignificant elements into objects packed with cultural substance.

The fact that most of us, including design-related professionals, are oblivious in that respect is somewhat intriguing, basically because the world we live in is loaded with objects. We go through life identifying, classifying, utilizing and evaluating objects, creating meaning for everything around us.

In the universe of electronic graphic interfaces, a variation of visual agnosia has been detected and is currently under study. It is called banner blindness and is described as a tendency the users have to simply ignore some shapes, colors, patterns and everything else in relative proximity. In those instances, we detect an inability to recognize what is being seen.

We may say that in the situation above, we see what is real but we do not see its representation.

That happens because our brain, as a result of previous experiences, works out cognitive models and proceeds to disregard irrelevant elements when searching for information.

Nielsen, the “Pope of Usability”, gives us some tips on how to avoid banner blindness, such as using a maximum of three banners a page, among others. Several other authors follow this same reasoning.

But is that enough to cure such blindness?

I believe the answer to visual agnosia does not lie in the number of banners placed within sites and maybe neither in their form, as sustained by some authors.

There already are examples of how to bypass forms of agnosia (visual or even auditory) in other media, like television for instance, where ads are inserted between news pieces, thus relaying the worth load of the news to the advertising and making the viewer commit his attention to the commercial message.

I do not mean to deal here with the ethical aspects of such procedure, but yet to demonstrate how important it is to understand the communicative tools of the medium we work in, namely the internet, and all the potential of its language.

“The limits of language represent the limits of my world”. Ludwig Wittgenstein