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Popular sites must be bad

According to Molblog and Metrixlab, this is the list of Top 10 'worst website' in Holland. Here's the list, along with the ranking of each website in the Top 20 Websites of 2008 in terms of Traffic according to Multiscope.

  1. Telegraaf (19)
  2. Hyves (2)
  3. KPN (-)
  4. MSN (7)
  5. Startpagina (9)
  6. Marktplaats (4)
  7. Mediamarkt (-)
  8. Belastingdienst (-)
  9. Postbank (10)
  10. Rabobank (18)
one sees the following strange fact:
7 out of 10 of the worst websites are in the Top 20 most visited websites
There are a few conclusions that you can draw from this.
  • People hate all sites. The most popular ones get most hate.
  • It really doesn't pay to invest in usability. Being bad may actually help.
  • The most visited sites fill a basic need. Sell stuff, do banking, stay in touch. Bad site or not, you need to get this done.
  • The most visited websites get visited so much because they are so bad. You can never find what you need, so you give up and come back later.
  • Notably absent in the Top 10 worst sites are Google and Buienradar.nl. They serve only one purpose. People like single purpose websites.

Quite strange. Do you have another conclusion?

Posted by Michiel on January 28, 2009 12:13 PM |

Comments

I would like to say something about one of your conclusions.

" It really doesn't pay to invest in usability. Being bad may actually help. "

I think investing in usability does pay.
For example the people who are visually impaired (about 350.000 - 400.000 in the Netherlands) should be able to visit a popular website as well.
If a website is not optimized regarding the guidelines of W3C, webrichtlijnen.nl (dutch government), drempelvrij.nl and/or Stichting Bartimeus, you exclude this target group.
That is a possible loss of 350.00 - 400.000 visitors a day ;-).

Regarding this I would like to refer to a presentation on a congres I organized. In this presentation Robert Jan Verkade (naarvoren.nl) and Stephan Hay (cinnamon.nl) show the improvement of the profile-page of hyves, when they would use the dutch webdevelopment guidelines.


http://pfcongrez.nl/2008/sheets/pfcongrez.pdf

Posted by: Clemens Schalkwijk | February 17, 2009 07:42 AM

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