User experience is an important aspect of website design. Remember the bad old days of the 1990s, with marquees, animated graphics everywhere, an excess of links that were just labelled “click here”, and garish background colours?
If you want to see an example of all of the above that will hurt your eyes, and maybe also your brain, check out Cameron’s World. It’s like taking a time machine back to the 1990s.
For a slightly more serious look at terrible interaction design, check out User In Yer Face, an exploration of confusing user interactions and design patterns.
Sometimes websites use bad user interface design deliberately, in order to trick users into buying an extra item that they don’t really need. This is called deceptive design, and it hurts your customers’ trust in your products and services.
Good website design takes into account a number of different principles which are based on the psychology of human-computer interaction, accessibility, and usability. Information is organized according to principles like Fitt’s Law and progressive disclosure, and can be categorized by target audience or by use case. These topics are included in our training course, Introduction to usability.
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