Having a coffee and cake with Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert from Nielsen Norman Group, I asked him what was holding up progress on the web. "Three things, really: I call them lazy, stupid and evil design," he replies. "Evil design is where they stop you from doing what you are trying to do, like putting an advert over the top of the page. That's the wrong way to do it. Google has made billions by putting the ads where people do want them, rather than where they don't want them."

Evil design is perpetrated by people who are deliberately doing the wrong thing, and this harms everyone. Nielsen cites pop-up windows as an example. Users now expect pop-ups to be unwanted ads, and close them without looking at them. As a result, good designers can no longer use pop-up windows even when they would be a good solution.

"We now have to say: 'Don't put your help text in a pop-up window.' It's ruined it for everybody," he adds.

"Stupid design is where companies are doing things that are known not to work. We now have 12 years documented experience that certain things work and certain things do not work," says Nielsen, "and companies are still doing things that do not work."
One example is the Flash intro. "Almost everybody knows that doesn't work, but every so often, a new website comes along and makes that mistake. That's stupid."

The solution is education. "We have to make it even more well known," he grins.

"Lazy design is where people just don't bother," says Nielsen. "That's actually quite common."

One example is the search facilities found on websites: "it's amazing how often they barely work," he says. Search is complicated, and even if sites buy search software, it has to be installed and tweaked to work correctly. Many companies just can't be bothered.

Putting up PDF files is another example: "it's the lazy way out," says Nielsen.

The answer to lazy design is often to convince the people who control the budgets that it is worth producing material specifically for the web, just as they do for print media, radio and television.

Still, at least Nielsen thinks we are making progress. This month, he has celebrated 10 years of giving free advice in his bi-weekly Alertbox column on web usability, and his Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design piece has now reached more than two million readers.

Ten years ago, Nielsen writes, "web people didn't care about usability, and usability people didn't care about the web. After years of incessantly promoting user research findings for websites and intranets, the situation has changed: thousands of people now work on online usability. Nielsen Norman Group alone has trained 11,208 people and, given that many other places teach usability as well, the worldwide total is no doubt much larger."

Unfortunately, even 20,000 designers may not have much impact on 20bn web pages - they'd have to design a million each. But they can set a good example, and that's a start.