What Is a Web Blooper?

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This book describes usability bloopers -mistakes-that Web designers and developers often make when designing and implementing websites and Web-based applications and explains how to avoid them. The focus is on bloopers that affect usability. How a website is designed also affects many other aspects of the user experience, such as brand recognition, organizational image, aesthetics, and trust. I am not an expert regarding such issues and defer to people who are (Flanders 2001; Flanders and Willis 1997; Mullet and Sano 1995).

Many of the bloopers discussed in this book are not the fault of poor design of the website itself, but of the back end-server-side applications, servers, and databases upon which the site depends. The point of presenting such bloopers is to convince developers and their management that successful websites and Web-based applications require user-centered, task-focused design of the back -end systems and the site itself. A good website cannot be slapped onto a poorly designed back end.

The bloopers in this book do not cover all of the mistakes Web designers make, or even all of the ones I have seen. To get into this book, a design mistake had to be not only embarrassingly bad but also common. There is little value in warning website developers away from rare or site-specific mistakes, no matter how horrible they may be. On the other hand, there is great value in warning developers away from common mistakes.

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