"Your designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Whether or not you appreciate the Jurassic Park reference, the web is awash with sites that "didn't stop to think if they should." I'm not talking here about the sites that suffer through lack of design or programming skills. Ignorance or incompetence are an excuse in this rant.

No, instead I'm talking about site designers that do have these skills in abundance. It's just that through a desire to showcase their skills (usually in prime offender, Flash) they commit creative hari-kari and render their sites totally unusable. The web is still a relatively new medium, yet there are still basic conventions that you should follow that don't have to compromise your creativity.

I'm talking about sites that try to reinvent the navigation wheel with floating menus, one-off scrolling bars, unintentionally-hidden links and, of course, those overly complicated intro movies.

The worst offenders are often web design agencies themselves who may or may not do great work for clients, but can't resist one creative flourish too many when it comes to their own sites. Take for example, these guys - I defy you to navigate their website without throwing something at the screen.

Any candidates you'd like to see savaged by a virtual T-Rex? Let's hear about them in the comments section.

Please tell me this is a spoof

I'm hoping this website design awards site is trying to be ironic...

OK, OK, I'm changing the design

After getting some less than complimentary comments about the design of the blog, I was shamed into a redesign.

One of the more perceptive comments was:
"I notice you used the first template option on Blogger"

I now look forward to more constructive/destructive criticism as readers try to understand quite what blue leaves have to do with a blog on internet communications (in fact, I'd welcome any explanations myself).

Usability - as easy as A-B-D

In the interests of research, I took part in an online usability study today for a major UK news site. Usability is increasingly tagged-on as a 'oh, yes, we do that' service, but the number of true experts is still relatively few. It's an accessible subject as so much of what it teaches is common sense. Indeed, after a quick read of Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox, many feel they 'get it', but there is much, much more to learn before you can become an objective expert in what is far too often a subjective field.

All the more interesting, then, to actually 'do usability' and participate in the study. It involved sitting in front of a camera, talking into the microphone and recording your screen as I completed a number of tasks. The tasks involved basic ones, such as navigating to the 'World News, section, navigating back to the homepage, to more in-depth tasks, such as finding an article on surfing by columnist 'x' without using search.

Given how well known the site was, the series of tasks showed how easy it is to let common sense pass you by in website design as a website evolves. The best example was 'find help' where you had to find a mysteriously-named 'information' section first up, before reaching the 'help' section buried beneath. Common sense, you'd say, but as sites grow organically, it's very difficult for the people that build them to take a step back and put themselves in the user's shoes, as the real headache of managing all that content becomes apparent.