3 Usability Hurdles We Simply Must Kick Over & Crunch Into a Pile of Splinters!

As web users, you are all aware of the horrid things that web designers, developers and advertisers put you through. These are the top 3 things that they need to stop doing!

3. Post-Roll Advertisements

When watching a video, your users are invested (one can hope) and you’d like them to come away from that experience with a positive attitude. Nothing spoils a great video like a post-roll ad the second it’s finished playing. Most of the time, you can’t pause or mute them and they force you to close the window which means: “bye bye potential conversion”. I suppose the good thing about post-roll ads is that your users have no choice but to watch them… That’s a good thing only if you want them to associate your product or service with hatred. Also, post-roll ads are also amazingly easy to ignore once the user figures out how to stop them. It doesn’t take a genius to pause the video two seconds before it reaches the end; in this scenario, your ad will never be seen. Gladly this trend seems to be dying a natural death.

Use Pre-roll instead as it’s less annoying and users typically posses more patience for pre-roll ads than tolerance for post-roll ads. (We’re already trained that way.)

2. Mouse-Over Scrollers

We all know the trend of the horizontal scroller: Images flow from right to left, carnival shooting-gallery style. Some scrollers use the mouse’s position to adjust the scrolling effect and it’s a bad user experience in most cases.

Typically, the user’s mouse naturally wanders. We glide the mouse over the screen when searching for clickable elements and interactions. The “Hover” or “Mouse Over” effect should be used for hinting, not initiation of actions. A mouse click or the scroll-wheel should be used for creating movement, not the movement of the mouse itself, without any deliberate interaction. This issue has become even more important as of late: touch screens like smart phones or the “not so mythical after all” tablets & slate computers don’t posses a way to “Hover” the mouse over an element.

Use hints along with deliberate interactions such as clicking or clicking and dragging to allow user interaction. Don’t make something significant happen just because the user’s mouse happened to glide over that area. (Dropdown navigation gets a pass here because it’s an accepted convention.)

3. Ads Sliding in From the Side of the Window

It has happened to all of us and is my number one peeve right now when it comes to usability. You’re reading a great article or looking for some information on a well designed web page when a square ad starts to slide in from the side of the window. You get angered, distracted, and could care less about the product that is being advertised.

1. That ad was not viewed by you. The ad placed itself in your field of vision… forcefully — not very good at all.
2. When an ad starts to slide in from the side, everyone immediately looks for the “close [x]” button and tries furiously to click it. (They didn’t see your clever advertising message either.)
3. Your users are now trained to snipe anything that moves the minute it peeks it’s ugly head into this shooting-gallery of a web site.

Use inline ads instead. Your users can choose to read them or not, which means they will probably be less frustrated when your message actually gets in their field of vision – voluntarily.

Think about the experience your users have; you wouldn’t be much without them.

What’s your opinion? Give us some feedback in the comments section. What website features do you hate and how would you improve the experience?

Related Reading:
Pre/Post roll ads are on the way out
Slideshows In Web Design: When And How To Use Them