Introduction

The emergence and meteoric rise in popularity of the World Wide Web beginning in the mid-1990s has not only immensely broadened access to information (and misinformation), it has also thrust a large number of people into the role of user interface designers for both better and worse. Furthermore, this trend will continue. To quote Web user interface analyst Jakob Nielsen [1999a, pages 65 66]:

If the [Web's] growth rate does not slow down, the Web will reach 200 million sites sometime during 2003 . The world has about 20,000 user interface professionals. If all sites were to be professionally designed by a single UI professional, we can conclude that every UI professional in the world would need to design one Web site every working hour from now on to meet demand. This is obviously not going to happen .

There are three possible solutions to the problem:

• Make it possible to design reasonably usable sites without having UI expertise;

• Train more people in good Web design; and

• Live with poorly designed sites that are hard to use.

Despite the obvious need to provide more design guidance to Web developers, I hadn't originally planned to include a separate chapter in this book for design bloopers that Web developers make. There were two reasons for this.

First, I wasn't convinced that Web bloopers are qualitatively different from the bloopers described elsewhere in this book. Developers of Web sites and Web applications can and do make the same mistakes that developers of traditional computer-based applications make. In fact,...