Category Archives: Accessibility

Accessibility includes elements of usability and designing for a wide audience.

How to Exterminate Customers

I am toying about putting together content for a comic, yet lessons learnt article. So this is a bullet list of ideas for an article entitled “How to Exterminate Customers”.

Any ideas of what to add are welcomed.

  • Inconsistent site structure.
    Yeah, the home page link was there a minute ago, but its over there now.
  • Broken site
    Broken images, broken links, designed for IE4, huge error messages, crashes your browser
  • Slow to load
    You could have a cup of tea before this loads.
  • Low quality photos
    Images of products that are itty bitty small and really don’t help or detract from the product
  • Excessive adverts
    Google ads plastered left right and center, and worst of all, inline with the content. Particularly bad when you’re in the checkout.
  • Using a tiiiiiiiny font
    Where’s my magnifying glass?
  • Using horrible colours
    Red text on green, or on very stripy background anyone?
  • Out of date, incorrect advice or information
    Bad advice is worse than no advice?
  • Flash loading screens
    Where’s the skip…
  • Breaking content into lots of needless pages
    Just let me read the article, don’t split it into lots of two paragraph pages so I have to keep clicking
  • Only works in one browser
    So I want to book my cinema tickets… in firefox. What do you mean I have to use Internet Explorer?!
  • Using massive forms
    I don’t want to tell you my life story, all I wanted was to register with an email and password.
  • Don’t display contact details
    I want to phone you, where’s your number, where’s your email?!
  • Sending Spam
    I just wanted to use your site, you made me log in to use the forum, now what is all this SPAM you are sending me?!
  • Large blocks of copy
    Paragraphs, quotes, formatting
  • Bad spelling
    American spellings exempt, but if you can’t spell your company name, you fail.

What puts you off from using a site, or shopping on it?