On the Web today, it doesn’t take much to leave a bad impression on a user. However, awareness of a few common usability pitfalls can drastically improve your site.

• Straying from Web standards – This holds true for not only the style standards of the organization and department, but the Web in general as well. For example, light text on a dark background has been shown to slow reading speeds by up to 30%, so use it wisely. Also, no one wants to see your flashing, seizure-inducing banner or your tie-dyed horizontal row divider.
• Endless text – Overestimation of the interest of users in textual content is all too common. A recent study found that users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. Skimming has become the norm, and it should be accounted for in your writing and layout.
• Bad architecture – Some experts report a site’s information architecture encompasses 80% of usability problems. Investment in an architecture planning stage, including addressing features like logical content organization, link labeling, and consistent navigation, typically pays off several times over in usability.
• Mobile inaccessibility – The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. This means that your site must support mobile devices, load quickly, and allow for my stubby fingers to distinguish between tiny text on my phone while I am driving my flying car (they’re coming out any day now, right?).

These select oversights most commonly occur when designing for the Web in isolation from users. This facilitates forgetfulness that real people will be using your site, not merely the idea that you have of their behavior. Not having the resources or time for usability testing is no excuse for user interaction, when meaningful feedback can be generated by asking simple tasks of those around you. For example, you can get some sense of how a novice user would handle your architecture by asking a parent or grandparent to find something on your site without using “the Google.”