Usability
Here’s a good IBM article on website usability, The cranky user: Instant back buttons:
“There are several main reasons why a user might abandon a page. Time is one of them; a page that takes longer than a user is willing to spend will be abandoned. Presentation problems (such as awful color schemes) can also drive people away. Annoying content may cause users to give up on a page, either because it’s distracting or because it takes too long to load. Finally, a page with no content can drive people away as quickly as anything.”
Lots of good points, but I had one serious gripe. In using the acronym LD50 (“Lethal dosage 50%; the amount of a specific substance required to kill 50% of a population. It’s used to measure toxicity of poisons.”), “LD50” was a hyperlink, presumably to the definition. I hate that! Will it open a popup help window? Will it skip down the page? Will it take me to another page? This is terrible, since the uncertainty of having to deal with finding my way back to my current place in the article usually convinces me not to follow the link. Perhaps at the time of writing (May 2001), the acronym tag wasn’t around yet, but today there is no excuse for not using an acronym tag: <acronym title="Lethal dosage 50%">LD50</acronym>. A hyperlink to a full definition may also be appropriate, but I shouldn’t have to leave the paragraph to at least get a rough idea what the acronym means!