I browse a lot of websites. I mean a whole lot. Over the past few weeks I’ve really been thinking about user interaction. What things are good, easy, and will keep a user on your site for a while, and what things are bad, difficult and will make your user leave and tell all their friends they hate your website.

Those things are typically small details, the kind that make people either love you or hate you. Below I’ve outlined 7 things that absolutely drive me nuts when I’m surfing the net.

1. Do not make me wait when I get to your website. If I have to wait through a long load, or an intro with no skip button, I will leave–making your message 100% ineffective.


2. Tell me who you are, and what you do immediately. That can be a short paragraph, or even just a single sentence. But however you decide to explain your existence, make it interesting and informative enough to keep me, but short enough so I’m not reading your About Us page.


3. Don’t make me search. Give me obvious places to go next. A kind of roadmap or choose your own adventure. Your homepage needs to either have big enough links in your navigation to draw my eye away from the content, or you need to have big shiny buttons on the homepage saying “You can go here and see this, or you can go here and see that!”. Either way, I need to know how to get to the next bit of information you want to feed me.


4. Don’t make your links hidden, graphics, or any other absurd thing. When I can’t figure out how to navigate to different sections (and especially the ones I’m looking for) then I’m going to leave without giving it a thought. In the same vain, don’t make your links cutsie names. If you have a portfolio, call it a portfolio, not something like “The Stuff”, or “Mindtease”.


5. Making a splash page with a “Click to enter” button makes me want to leave right there. I’m already on your domain, why make me go through another process to get to the information I need. The more clicks I have, the less likely I am to appreciate your concern for users, which happen to be me.


6. Full screen, smaller screen, odd-shaped screen... Quit making my browser change sizes. It’s already a great size, and if your site doesn’t fit in my browser, I’ll resize it so I can see the content. I almost always have more than one website open in my browser (the advent of Tabs in Safari made that much easier) and when all of my websites all of a sudden go full screen, it makes me want to close your website and forget I ever clicked on it.


7. Popups. I don’t even have to explain this one. They are pretty much universally hated.

Well, I hope these 7 tips help you make a more user-friendly website. Think about these and any other usability issues you can in the planning stage of yours or you clients website. If it makes it to Photoshop, it’s typically too late.