Are you guilty of these 20 web design crimes?

Want to ensure your web design projects conform to agreed practices? North is a collaborative, evolving project on GitHub that lays out a "set of standards and best practices for developing modern web based properties".

Nothing here is set in stone - contributions from the community are welcome and it's "meant to be a living document". But it's still an interesting insight into what some consider the right and wrong things to do. And as the Sideproject.io blog recently noted, its list of Outdated UX Patterns makes for particularly fascinating reading.

Commonly used website elements such as large background images ("add a large amount of weight ... for very little actual gain"), mega menus ("create complexity issues"), and social buttons ("add lots of clutter to a page") come under fire for damaging the user experience. Other culprits include:

• Carousels
• Hover States for Additional Information
• Mega Footer
• Large Sticky Headers/Footers
• Text In/As Images
• Text Over Images
• Overlays
• Back Buttons
• Page Preloaders
• Social logins
• Content Pagination
• Content Insertionals
• Auto Play Media
• Non User Triggered Actions
• Infinite Pagination
• Missing Navigational Trails
• Unexplained Merged Functionality

Do your websites feature any of these? Then you'd best get over to the GitHub to find out what's wrong with them from a UX perspective. We'd love to hear what you think of the project's advice!

[via Sideproject.io]

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