Technology overkill
By Kristoffer Bohmann, Bohmann Usability
Technology overkill. Too often, websites differentiate themselves in terms of the visual appearance of the site. Not only are most "cool" designs irrelevant to the user experience. They may even make a negative contribution by annoying users and slowing down their performance. In turn, users leave to competing sites.
You can test the downsides of most visual designs by comparing them to a minimalist version of the same design (plain HTML, very little graphics if any). You simply observe how well users perform when using the minimalist design compared to the "cool" design. The minimalist design wins if it performs better. If the two design are equal, consider using the minimalist version anyway since it is often cheaper. Only use the visually oriented design if it performs significantly better (e.g., overall usability is improved by 100%) to justify the extra development costs.
Kristoffer Bohmann
