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10 Things that make me hit the back button + 1 bonus item

Written on February 18th 2008, filed under Usability with 4 comments.

There's one thing you have to remember when you work on a website: There are thousands of sites like yours out there and most of them are better. This is why it's so important not to annoy users with useless fluff, a point often lost on clients.

Unlike a real physical store there's no indirect commitment to look around when you enter a website. There's one big, green back button and it gets used a lot:

  1. Splash pages
    When you ask someone why they use a splash page, you won't get a real answer. That's because they serve no purpose. They don't seduce me to visit the site, I'm all ready there, and the only thing they do is keeping me away from the actual content. If you have to show off your fancy Flash skills, try integrating the splash page with the homepage.

  2. Forcing me to listen to music
    There I am, browsing around the Internet listening to my iTunes when all of a sudden my music is interrupted by some lame loungy musical loop. Apparently the owners of the site thought that I would buy more carpets if I listened to music. It only made me click the back button.

  3. Not showing me enough information
    Since I can't hold an actual product in my hands I need you to tell me all that I need to know about it and more. I want to know what it does, how it works, what other people think of it, what it costs, how much I might save and more. The only thing I don't need is useless and empty marketing blabber. Ever.

  4. Requiring me to log in to see information
    I'm just not ready to commit to you. I don't want to give you my e-mail address and name when all I want to do is to see what you have to offer. Show me what you have and if I'm interested, I'll tell you more about me. When was the last time you walked into a store and were asked to provide your address just to see what they sold? I rest my case.

  5. Hiding clickable items
    I'll be honest: I'm lazy. I don't want to go searching for something to click. If I can't find anything to do, I'll go to one of the other sites. It's less of an effort then scanning through an entire page hoping that a pointer cursor appears.

  6. Sending me to the homepage after a search
    I still don't understand this one. I was searching for something and immediately found what I was looking for. I clicked the link and then it happened: Instead of showing me the page that showed up on the SERP, a redirect occurred. I needed to restart my visit from the homepage. Needless to say, I clicked the back button and went to site number 2.

  7. Having a page that takes forever to load
    I'm an impatient guy. I have a broadband connection and if your site takes longer then 10 to 15 seconds to show me some content, I'm out of there. There are just too many ways to get the page size down or to optimize your site. Use them.

  8. Having a terrible internal search engine
    When I'm searching for "On writing well", I expect this book to show up first. Not any other book that has either "on", "writing" or "well" in its title. Yes I could use quotes and other advanced search techniques, but I'm lazy and ignorant and expect you to be smart for me.

  9. Having a terrible productindex
    I'm looking for ways to sort products (like alphabetically, by author or release date and more). I want to be able to find my way through the index fast. Make sure I can. If it becomes a maze without end, I’ll end up leaving.

  10. Stopping my workflow
    Success! I've found what I'm looking for! I click on the order button and what does it do? It shows a JavaScript alert: "You have to be logged in to place an order". Why not show me an actual page that allows me to log in or register? This way you keep me engaged in ordering what I want from your site. Don't ask me to search for that log in button myself, I'll just go back and try my luck elsewhere.

As promised: I've also got 1 bonus item for you. Don't open other sites in new windows. I like my back button, it works just fine. When you open a new window you're forcing me to do something radical: shut down an instance of a program. I can go back and forth by using the back button, but when I close a window it's gone forever. This makes it too intrusive.

All of these are just basic common sense as far as I'm concerned, unfortunately, common sense seems to be the first thing out the window when it comes to developing websites.

4 Comments so far

Add your own

  1. Pressemitteilung - February 18th 2008 - 22:48

    very interesting!

    I will try sieser scores points to hug to take wink

  2. Michael Ashworth - February 19th 2008 - 14:38

    Interesting.

    I think point 6 is a bit severe though! If I remove a page from my site, what other options are there? I can either leave it as it is so that you come from the Search
    Engines to a 404 page or I can redirect you to the home page! I think the latter is a much better option imho.

    the other nine points are spot on though smile

  3. Tim Ceuppens - February 19th 2008 - 19:06

    Hi Michael,

    Sure when you remove a page you can use a redirect, but in this case the actual page opened and then after about a second or so it relocated me to the homepage. I might have been a bit more clear about that.

  4. Branko Collin - February 22nd 2008 - 15:43

    Michael Ashworth, for one thing you should not* be removing pages from your site. There may be inbound links from all kinds of locations, and you’re going to confuse visitors a lot who follow such links. Better would be a place holder page that says something like: “what you’re looking for is not here anymore, but you might be interested in this,” where this is a relevant link to related content.

    *) The exception would be dynamically generated pages, as they are not unique to begin with, so it would be hard to determine what exactly it is that you are trying to preserve.

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