In my post about query statistics for search.ch yesterday, I wrote on the importance of the implicit notion of ranking in all sorts of result pages: User increasingly expect some intentional meaning in the order the items are presented, not a mere reflection of the underlying database structure.
Much too often you still find many sites, whose designers merely construct a few pages around a given database design, making the user think like a computer scientist to find the required information, e.g. to answer non of the questions in a form to get an overview of all items and generally only exposing things through complex query interfaces, even if browsing would be perfectly possible (e.g. short lists, like upcoming event). These are designs that help the computer instead of the user. Probably, this is often due to the use of seemingly easy toolkits, which expose the database content almost 1:1.
Some even ask the user the enter information in awkward syntaxes. Jeremy Zawodny recently pointed to a hilarious site covering this phenomena, the "No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame: A list of sites, which can't even do the simplest transformation on input data, e.g. stripping non-digit characters. Many more can be found with this query.
Posted by seefeld at June 20, 2003 11:19