The Internet sucks - what do you think?

[zioxide]

I saw your post, but I was already in the middle of updating the site, because I was not so happy with the solution inside the 'your website' cell. It's updated now.

You don't think it's that intuitive. Well it's hard to measure on a scale, which is the most intuitive. But if you can find these targets, it's intuitive 'enough' for you to navigate the website, which is more than can be said for a lot of websites out there. This is our goal.

It's not that intuitive. Why can't I click anywhere in the cell and activate it? It only works when you actually click on the text.

We like to do SEO things, like tags etc. But we do not design the website around it. Instead we make it for the humans who will actually use the site first, and think of SEO second.

That's a good way to make sure nobody can find your website. And it's terribly inefficient.. you're increasing the amount of work you need to do if you don't just build correctly from the start. That's like putting down some bricks, building a house, and then deciding when you're about to put up sheetrock that you want to pour a concrete foundation.

We never thought for a second, that a brand new concept would be praised or even accepted by the contemporary web design industry. That's just not how things work. But we are making a bet that the users will prefer something way more easy.

To be completely frank, nothing you have here is a "brand new concept". It's a decent GUI but nothing that we haven't seen before (Windows 8 start menu?). The execution is lacking though. You need to read some books on modern content strategy (and how it pertains to responsive design, of which content hierarchy and highlighting vital content are critical aspects), the philosophy of web design, and designing for the new IOT web. The desktop portion of the web is shrinking every day. Companies that don't design for the new web are going to be out of business in a few years.

It looks and works just like the desktop, on an iPad. We agree with Apple that websites should not be designed specifically for mobile devices. But as an example we disagree with Apple's fundamental website navigation.

Apple disagrees with you. You've repeated this a few times but it couldn't be further from the truth. Apple started pimping web apps and mobile websites right after the iPhone came out. Remember around the release of the original iPhone and iPhone OS 1.0, over a year before anything related to the App Store and native 3rd party apps came about?

Now Apple is teaching responsive design courses at WWDC. They're all about mobile web apps and responsive web experiences. You can bet we'll be seeing a new responsive Apple.com in the near future.

 

[NeilHD]

In our last investigation, we saw compelling evidence that IE is now at somewhere between 8 and 25%, not 53% as I stated earlier. Did I already post this? Well I think we can stand a rerun of the good news.

Once you drop from 90 + market share down to these levels, it's over. Pop the champagne.

IE sucks, "ie" it is no more. rules.

For compelling evidence I'll give you some real data. I work for a fairly major e-commerce site ($1bn annual sales) where I lead a development team. Looking at our browser stats over the past 24 hours I can see that IE is approx 28% of our traffic. However - and this is the important bit - that is still our largest browser share. More than Chrome (23%), more than Mobile Safari (also 23%) and more than Firefox (13%). The rest is mixture of normal Safari and various mobile browsers.

So the important points here are:
IE is still the most-used browser - at least by our customers - even if it's market share has diminished a lot.
Mobile Safari (so iphones and ipads) is joint 2nd, bringing us back to the importance of responsive.

In e-commerce, you get it right or you go out of business. We don't consider all this an "Art", we consider it a Science. Everything is thought through and tested thoroughly. New designs and changes to the flow through the site go through A/B tests. If the numbers don't look good, we drop it. Conversion rates, bounce rates, all this stuff is monitored to make sure we increase sales. And the way we increase sales is by improving the experience for the consumer. It may not be idealistic and it isn't challenging the status quo, but it makes money.

I'm not saying your way won't work and I don't want to discourage you because I like the fact you're trying something new and I look forward to seeing improvements as and when. What I am saying though is that your customers - and their customers - will want and need things to work. That means cross-browser. It means standards. It means accessibility. It means responsiveness. With a million people using a site daily, you have to cater for a lot of different things. Even those one-in-a-million situations will happen every day!

 

[zioxide]

For compelling evidence I'll give you some real data. I work for a fairly major e-commerce site ($1bn annual sales) where I lead a development team. Looking at our browser stats over the past 24 hours I can see that IE is approx 28% of our traffic. However - and this is the important bit - that is still our largest browser share. More than Chrome (23%), more than Mobile Safari (also 23%) and more than Firefox (13%). The rest is mixture of normal Safari and various mobile browsers.

So the important points here are:
IE is still the most-used browser - at least by our customers - even if it's market share has diminished a lot.
Mobile Safari (so iphones and ipads) is joint 2nd, bringing us back to the importance of responsive.

In e-commerce, you get it right or you go out of business. We don't consider all this an "Art", we consider it a Science. Everything is thought through and tested thoroughly. New designs and changes to the flow through the site go through A/B tests. If the numbers don't look good, we drop it. Conversion rates, bounce rates, all this stuff is monitored to make sure we increase sales. And the way we increase sales is by improving the experience for the consumer. It may not be idealistic and it isn't challenging the status quo, but it makes money.

I'm not saying your way won't work and I don't want to discourage you because I like the fact you're trying something new and I look forward to seeing improvements as and when. What I am saying though is that your customers - and their customers - will want and need things to work. That means cross-browser. It means standards. It means accessibility. It means responsiveness. With a million people using a site daily, you have to cater for a lot of different things. Even those one-in-a-million situations will happen every day!

Good post. The bold especially is spot on.

When it comes to browser marketshare, I saw this article on twitter this morning:

TheNextWeb

Won't post any text, you can click over to read the article, but this pie chart sums it up:

Now, this is worldwide marketshare, so it will vary from site to site depending on your customers and target markets. But it just goes to show how big IE still is, unfortunately.

 

[NeilHD]

Good post. The bold especially is spot on.

Now, this is worldwide marketshare, so it will vary from site to site depending on your customers and target markets. But it just goes to show how big IE still is, unfortunately.

And IE8 especially - a huge share and all because of Windows XP. I ALWAYS get tripped up on IE8 because I don't have it on my machine (I use a VM with it on when I remember!). And fairly often I'll do something that works fine on everything I test, then I give it to someone at our parent company to test (huge organisation, still stuck on IE8) and they'll tell me it has a few bugs. And it's always because IE8 does something a bit differently. Later versions of IE are much more compliant.

 

[pitechindore]

Websites are not only the source of information, instead websites are designed to give the user a better experience. As the experience enhances the website's attraction increases eventually. Most of the people just try to put so much information are fancy designs on their websites, but it only creates a silly impression. Making a website with solid impact needs perfect combination of various factors such as headlines, website copy, better font size, beautiful and easy layout.

 

[Flood123]

Since it is a little over one year later I would like to know where the original poster is regarding progress on his companies progress. Inquiring minds want to know.

 

[olup]

Since it is a little over one year later I would like to know where the original poster is regarding progress on his companies progress. Inquiring minds want to know.

Last entry on their facebook page dates back to oct 2014, seems like they abandoned their project.

 

[Flood123]

Last entry on their facebook page dates back to oct 2014, seems like they abandoned their project.

Maybe they realized they were barking up the wrong tree.

 

[fabulousrice]

Seriously, I am so sick of confusing websites and idiotic designs.

Apple.com is probably the best one I know of, but even that website could be more logical to navigate. Microsoft and the like of course being horrific examples of the opposite side of the scale.

In fact, I formed a company now and we are developing completely new, from the ground up and totally different navigation concepts for online shopping, forum, blog, wikipedias, and even social networks. But also just basic normal websites for clients, done in a different way.

So we're determined to change everything, and have come up with a fundamentally different philosophy for sorting and structuring content, presenting the visitor with a few easy choices at first, and let them zero in on why they came to the given site to begin with. We call it Topic Related Object Navigation gui.

We think it's pretty bad out there, but what do you think? Can we even call Facebook "easy" by any stretch?

What is the worst examples of websites that you know of?

I agree with you that 99% of websites out there are badly designed.
Most morons out there will call the designer basically when the website is completely developed and coded, and ask them to "paint over" the code instead of using desing the way it's meant to be used - to design something rather than "make it pretty".
But the approach you suggest relies on the fact that the visitor of a website would know beforehand what to find there and what to click... if you're not listing all the options and pages, that is. So, ,I don't know... Would love to see examples.

 

[quatermass]

Yes, 99% of the web conforms to Sturgeons Law. And it's getting worse, not better. I did some consulting for the travel industry years ago, and found a a complete shop of horrors. Either the site designers didn't know about, or just plain ignored the basics - and then wondered why no-one used their sites and didn't make bookings. I worked with a UK bank on their site - specifically forms. Only after several months of trial and error did they remember they had a Forms Design department which did all the printed forms and that they should probably talk to them!

I agree with you that 99% of websites out there are badly designed.
Most morons out there will call the designer basically when the website is completely developed and coded, and ask them to "paint over" the code instead of using desing the way it's meant to be used - to design something rather than "make it pretty".
But the approach you suggest relies on the fact that the visitor of a website would know beforehand what to find there and what to click... if you're not listing all the options and pages, that is. So, ,I don't know... Would love to see examples.

 

[Flood123]

I'm really curious to know how this all panned out for the OP.

 

[Tozovac]

I'm really curious to know how this all panned out for the OP.

Me too. I just noticed this thread, having posted a recent question about today's websites being so awful.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-is-website-design-so-awful-today-generally.2053819/

Funny, to me, 2014 was the last of the good old days when websites didn't all look alike with wasted expanses of white space, boring light blue font, and unintuitive buttonless flat design, with functions hidden underneath hamburger icons, gear icons, head profile icons, three ellipses icons, etc.

 

[Xowi]

I think the web is great and wish more of the old school niche websites we’re still live.

The web is going to really SUCK if the US gov’t kills net neutrality.

 

[AZhappyjack]

Seriously, I am so sick of confusing websites and idiotic designs.

Apple.com is probably the best one I know of, but even that website could be more logical to navigate. Microsoft and the like of course being horrific examples of the opposite side of the scale.

In fact, I formed a company now and we are developing completely new, from the ground up and totally different navigation concepts for online shopping, forum, blog, wikipedias, and even social networks. But also just basic normal websites for clients, done in a different way.

So we're determined to change everything, and have come up with a fundamentally different philosophy for sorting and structuring content, presenting the visitor with a few easy choices at first, and let them zero in on why they came to the given site to begin with. We call it Topic Related Object Navigation gui.

We think it's pretty bad out there, but what do you think? Can we even call Facebook "easy" by any stretch?

What is the worst examples of websites that you know of?

It’s a colossal waste of resources … a time suck with no real pay-off. That’s why I refuse to spend more than 8-10 hours a day using it.

The world is full of lemmings who wait to be told that they like and how they should use what’s placed before them.

If one were to build a better website, the world might just show up.

 

[Tozovac]

Seriously, I am so sick of confusing websites and idiotic designs.

Apple.com is probably the best one I know of, but even that website could be more logical to navigate. Microsoft and the like of course being horrific examples of the opposite side of the scale.

What is the worst examples of websites that you know of?

Today? Paypal... Dropbox... all looking alike with too much boring light blue/white flat design. Apple's user help community that went from a usable forum to white-out wasted-space mess joke of a website... Or sites from creators who believe their site needs to be an entertainment experience first rather than an informational portal.

And now sadly, even Ebay & Amazon are toying with moving closer to the flat-deisgn blue-white-grey Apple-iOS-like-UI....

LINK

In fact, I formed a company now and we are developing completely new, from the ground up and totally different navigation concepts for online shopping, forum, blog, wikipedias, and even social networks. But also just basic normal websites for clients, done in a different way.

If one were to build a better website, the world might just show up.

With all due respect: what was wrong with the average website ~4 years ago, before website designers turned into sad lemmings and borrowed the worst of the worst of Apple's iOS UI after Jony Ive ruined it...turning to white/grey/light-blue flat-design layouts with less-intuitive UI elements completely unnecessarily reinvented so Jony could show the ousted Scott Forestall who was boss...

So we're determined to change everything, and have come up with a fundamentally different philosophy for sorting and structuring content, presenting the visitor with a few easy choices at first, and let them zero in on why they came to the given site to begin with. We call it Topic Related Object Navigation gui.

This actually frightens me, with all due respect. Again, as I said above, in a format where it's so, so easy to quickly change and upgrade, I believe websites got pretty darn mature & effective around 5 years ago. But then around 4 years ago with the advent of iOS7, it seemed makers of sites started throwing spaghetti on the wall and implementing some pretty questionable (and unnecessary IMHO) reinventions just to try something new. Google's "material design" is just boringly awful to me, borne from Android that had to differentiate itself from iOS but never matched up to "the leader" iOS imho...then in a stunning move, Apple starts following Google's Material Design cues with flat/monochrome/simplistic UI, followed by web designers lemmingly following Apple's lead (as usual), resulting in the awful mess of website layouts/UI we're stuck with today... Please no need to reinvent something unless you can point to what was broken 5 years ago in the average website...before hero images...before blue/white/grey flat-deisgn layouts... etc.