By Alexey Gavrilov on February 20, 2008

Jakob Nielsen writes about some frequent mistakes in application design.

Here is his list (with my comments)

1. Non-Standard GUI Controls (sometimes you have to use non-standard controls, if they can do the job better; otherwise we would stop the GUI design evolution in 60-ties)
2. Inconsistency (inconsistency is bad, but in the context vs consistency battle context wins)
3. No Perceived Affordance (agreed)
4. No Feedback (agreed)
5. Bad Error Messages (I would generalize this to include bad copy in general)
6. Asking for the Same Info Twice (who does that after all?)
7. No Default Values (agreed)
8. Dumping Users into the App (I didn’t understand this one)
9. Not Indicating How Info Will Be Used (hmm… I don’t suppose explaining everything is a good idea; it’s better to let user correct the mistake easily, when necessary)
10. System-Centric Features (I would call them useless features — pretty obvious)

The complete article, while being a bit on a linkbait side, worth checking out too.