Nothing drives me crazy more than web sites with poor user experience/interface. Typically, these sites are not professional in caliber and don’t last long if they are in any way used as revenue stream. With user experience design, you get what you pay for. Poor user experience = no repeat users. What boils my blood, to that end, is a site that has decent UX on the whole, but purposely implements bad UX in the name of stretching dollars. Let me explain…

Niche sites, which are, at most, glorified blogs with a few writers, by and large, derive income based on traffic. They seek to provide content that will keep users coming back and to, hopefully, attract new users. The more volume a site has, the more the site can demand in ad dollar percentages. Most sites stick to the tried and true ad serving methods of banners and Google Adwords. Sites in this model will serve up a new set of AdWords and/or a banner on each and every page on the site with the hopes that you will click on one of these retarded ads, as it is one $ tier for simply serving up ads in bulk numbers vs. how many were actually clicked on (and to a further degree, which clicked ads even converted to a sale,etc.). So, in this model, the more pages served up = better chances at big bucks. Ok, what’s the point?

In this day of Digg.com, Reddit.com ,etc., content owners try their damndest to get linked into to really drive those numbers up. Hell, I want the same thing! (but not for money, more for ego!) What the offenders do is to bait a user in with what seems like decent content and, mostly, it actually is good content. Where they go wrong is by pulling a content bait-and-switch; you visit the article and it is either broken up into several “pages” when it could really just be one page (Cracked.com is famous for this), or, it contains an “image gallery” that is stretched out over pages upon pages when a simple, self contained image gallery can exist on a page without the excessive clicking.For shame!

Here’s a great example- an article today on the car/truck niche site, Jalopnik.com. Jalopnik.com, I suspect, started as a site to post cool stuff about cars and such, but, has grown into a revenue blog and with it, absolutely horrible UX. The site not only gives you a big banner in the top right og the site disuguised amongst it’s content call-out, it hits you again mid-way down the page, and pimps the blog network that it’s in on the left side. So bloated with bullshit this site is, the most simple thing they can do to retain users and gain new ones- a subscription button- is buried beneath the diarrhea of spam enveloping the site on the bottom left instead of being top, right and prominent. Rather than trying to cast such a wide net to account for (what I’m sure is) a high bounce rate, they should concentrate on better UX to keep users and build fans, despite what their ad network tells them.

On the web, you get one shot with a user. If a user is coming to your site because they connect with your content, you have them. Why not keep them?