Why is website design so awful today, generally?

[Tozovac]

I know one of the senior web designers at Amazon. I gather that every design change at Amazon is A/B tested to within an inch of its life, and that there are scores of A/B tests going on at any one time. It's all about the metrics.

Derekmlr has explained far better than I ever could (am not a designer) and is clearly far more knowledgeable.

I'm not a designer either, but I'll push to the end of days that too much focus on metrics is too easily morphed into too much focus on the business at the expense of the user experience, very similar to the problem of a designer designing a site for himself and his ego and not the users (like ios7 imho). Amazon may focus on metrics to the nth degree but they clearly also clearly have a very firm understanding of how to present a pleasing user experience, something I cannot say for many sites.
[doublepost=1500606757][/doublepost]

Sort version, minus your obviously skewed comment, yes.

And that's sad. Apple's site used to be unique and attractive and engaging, yet offering a very efficient website experience. I don't feel it's as enjoyable as it was before, from the overly in-Apple-like flat monochromatic artwork/icons to very especially the awful community help forum UI. Back to the topic of this thread I started, websites today to me just don't feel as enjoyable to use as 5 to 10 years ago when I think they were more geared to be intuitive and prompting to the user, even if at the very slight expense of letting users move through a site 3/4 as fast as businesses think people move through their sites today. Unless the metric chasers have a camera or microphone going, how sure can they be that users aren't moving faster through their site today because there's just less interesting things to look at than before.

I also think you're romanticizing some of the past designs you refer to a bit, but that's a separate issue

Ha ha, yeah maybe. I guess there's no accounting for taste as they say. Some folk have more discerning taste & standards while others may be more adaptable and almost instantly willing to work with whatever they're given and just adapt quickly. Different benefits to being each.

 

[Tozovac]

This is what their buyer's guide looked like in 2010. And here it is in 2012. The change since has been minimal between 2012 and now, mostly just removing the latest news posts right sidebar and using that new space to better balance out the data. But in general, the move has been to improve focus on the information relative to the use case of the page while helping usability with clearer structure.

Hi, I think I made a mistake when I was complaining about a current site's interface vs. its appearance just a few short years ago. I was very much speaking of the apple insider's buyer's guide moreso than the macrumor.com's buyer's guide. I'm unable to look up historical webpage views at work due to the blockers but currently the website looks like one of those screens you see when you try to reach a dead website and the hosting company presents to you a white screen general listing of similar-named websites (an example of which I'm also unable to look up here at work). Here are some views of the current appleinsider.com buyer's guide pages that are largely space-wasting and scroll-heavy and so flat that they don't even look like it's a real webpage to me, very much triggering a decade's worth of seasoning where such a plain-looking webpage only occurred when you reached a dead website:



Then, on this obviously mobile-"optimized" page, if when on a desktop you click on one of the items such as "new macs," you'll see nothing happen at all because the results are off-page down below. Once again, more guessing, wonderment, confusion, and increased work than before. Anyone who's used this site around 2014 should recall that the results & presentation pages were much more efficiently-organized and allowed for seeing many more results easily on the screen. Now we have this mess that at first glance to me looks like a dead web page, and then later requires hunting and guessing to find what you're looking for.

I don't get it. Even if a site like this lets the 95% percentile of users click to where they're going in 1/4 the time it took before, are we really moving forward with sites that look like this example above, compared to how they used to look & work? Sure someone can say "but this is just one site, and there are others that..." That's not a good answer anymore, as there are just too many mobile-optimized sites that strike me as being a heck of a lot worse to use than before.

 

[frankgrimes]

Because it sucks to be paid the same for twice the work.

Of course it does that's why focussing on a professional looking desktop site should be the goal. Most people are getting work done by using their computers.

I used to love browsing sites like Nike, Ford, nhl. com and the mentioned tsn.ca/nhl etc. but infinite scrolling, lots of wasted space and awesome design taking a backseat for whatever reason has reduced my visits by almost 60 percent. Having pages is much better than infinite scrolling.

Worst modern design decisions are for sure Apples site re design especially the forums it flat-out sucks, Amazon und their image heavy startsite and of course Yahoo it's not even readable anymore.

I think Website design had their qlimax when companies like 2 advanced where hired to produce kickass websites, nowadays a lot of sites look like web blogs or MySpace sites while costing a lot of money go figure

 

[rsdotscot]

Most people are getting work done by using their computers.

And yet the analytics for all of the sites I've produced report that mobile visitors vastly outnumber desktop visitors.

Why would you make things better for a small fraction of your visitors at the expense of the rest? That makes no sense whatsoever.

 

[Tozovac]

And yet the analytics for all of the sites I've produced report that mobile visitors vastly outnumber desktop visitors.

Why would you make things better for a small fraction of your visitors at the expense of the rest? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Those metrics couldn't possibly be because we all have a mobile/tablet device in our pocket 16 hours of the day (and likely under the pillow or on a nightstand within easy reach before and after sleep) and not a laptop in our pocket, could they?

I spend more time on my feet in work shoes on a given day than in my bed, but the last thing I want is a bed as thin and firm as my shoe soles, or to be expected to sleep standing up in my shoes. When I want to get serious or thoughtful work done, it's never on a mobile device even if I use one 10 times throughout the day to view a site and scope a few things out, only to later deep dive it at work or home on a desktop/laptop where a keyboard/mouse interface and larger monitor allow a completely different and more immersive experience. Or, by your logic, why isn't every employer and household abandoning the desktop/laptop? Kudos to the companies who aren't blind to the numbers and recognize that one shoe does not fit all, paying a little more for their customers.
[doublepost=1501328914][/doublepost]As an additional note, another horrible lemmings-like design fied I can't wait to go away is using both hamburger and gear icons at the top of the page, sometimes with a third icon of a head/user. Unlike signs for women's and men's restrooms, it's never clear what each of those offer, requiring more guesswork and clicks and frustrations all for the sake of a supposedly clean-looking interface that may allow a web designer to go home feeling nice inside that day but at the expense much less efficient interface at times for the user.

 

[rsdotscot]

You're still looking at this from your own perspective, whereas designers and developers have to work towards meeting the needs of a website's target audience. We do what we can to accommodate as many potential visitors as possible, but it's unreasonable to expect absolutely everyone's personal setup and preferences to be catered to, you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Or, by your logic, why isn't every employer and household abandoning the desktop/laptop?

That's a false equivalency. Phones and tablets aren't productivity tools, they're consumption devices, and they're the devices being used for most web consumption. It'd be madness not to recognise this and design websites accordingly, and it doesn't involve not having desktop users catered to unless the front end designer is a complete amateur.

As an additional note, another horrible lemmings-like design fied I can't wait to go away is using both hamburger and gear icons at the top of the page, sometimes with a third icon of a head/user. Unlike signs for women's and men's restrooms, it's never clear what each of those offer, requiring more guesswork and clicks and frustrations all for the sake of a supposedly clean-looking interface that may allow a web designer to go home feeling nice inside that day but at the expense much less efficient interface at times for the user.

The hamburger (navigation menu) and head (account/profile) icons are pretty ubiquitous these days, and I couldn't see the extreme majority of users having trouble with them come their second encounter. You can't seriously be saying that you struggle with them at this point unless you have some kind of cognitive issue which results in memory loss of such things.

If you have a suggestion for how to include a full navigation area on a page (remembering to consider how many clients request more than a couple of top level links) while maintaining accessibility on a small display without initially hiding it from view, I'd love to take a look.

 

[Tozovac]

You're still looking at this from your own perspective, whereas designers and developers have to work towards meeting the needs of a website's target audience.

Shame on me for looking at things from my user's perspective. Clearly the website designer's perspective is all that should matter. Interesting contradiction though. If I'm using a site, then by default I'm part of the target audience but then I'm wrong for looking at things from my perspective when using a website that I find to have a poor UI and bland minimized appearance? If a designer was truly working toward a target audience instead of their preferences or more likely their paying customer's preferences, they would consider the differences & opportunities of the audience's various devices. To many sites accessed today via desk/laptop look are just awful to use compared to their pre-"improved" design.

We do what we can to accommodate as many potential visitors as possible, but it's unreasonable to expect absolutely everyone's personal setup and preferences to be catered to, you can't please all of the people all of the time.

I never said sites should be catered to each user, nor that sites should please every user, nice try. But clearly as more and more sites are catered to a mobile environment while not offering a desktop/laptop-specific site, it's often to the detriment of the desktop/laptop experience. So outside of a website owner's budget constraints, do you actually think it's unreasonable to consider two sites, one for mobile and one catered to take advantage of the additional screen space of a desktop/laptop as well as using the ability to hover a mouse over an actionable item and enter/type data much quicker than via phone/tablet?

That's a false equivalency. Phones and tablets aren't productivity tools, they're consumption devices, and they're the devices being used for most web consumption. It'd be madness not to recognise this and design websites accordingly, and it doesn't involve not having desktop users catered to unless the front end designer is a complete amateur.

So it's not madness to often hamstring users of a productivity device with a blocky space-wasting site clearly optimized for mobile? All I keep hearing is "cater to favor the device with the most users" with complete blindness to the negative tradeoffs to the desk/laptop experience. That's why I openly questioned why is website design so, so poor so often nowadays.

The hamburger (navigation menu) and head (account/profile) icons are pretty ubiquitous these days, and I couldn't see the extreme majority of users having trouble with them come their second encounter. You can't seriously be saying that you struggle with them at this point unless you have some kind of cognitive issue which results in memory loss of such things.

Nice try, leaving out the gear icon to help with your insult insinuation. Cherry-picking & insulting...great ways to communicate effectively.

Sites using both the gear & hamburger icons are more of the issue here, as designers (or their customers) blindly follow the UI fad du jour of hiding functions under them. I've used this before but this awful burner phone app I use leaves me constantly guessing as to where to find certain functions, under the hamburger icon, the gear icon... This is an app but I'll try to start keeping notes for when I come across a site with a flair of minimized function icons hiding all kinds of features/functions that are kind of difficult to intuitively know what's underneath them.



Come to think of it, I first saw gear & hamburger icons on apps, where they often attempt to give you full-functionality on one screen w/o needing to scroll. That fit in well with the uber-minimalization craze, allowing Jony Ive and other designers to bury functions under one button on an app's main page. Then web designers started using those app-specific features on their mobile & desktop sites, being completely unnecessarily in the world of 24" monitors and 13-15" laptops except for maybe classroom minimalization design contests. When did it become a universal maxim that apps & mobile device interfaces & desktop/laptop interfaces must all look alike? This again is an example of a designer solving a non-existent problem, maybe for the sake of making work and keeping busy.

Another sad facet of today's websites is requiring a desk/laptop user to click twice just to search something, one click to open the magnifying glass into a search box instead of floating a search box constantly on the screen, and then a second click in the search box just to start typing)....but I digress....

If you have a suggestion for how to include a full navigation area on a page (remembering to consider how many clients request more than a couple of top level links) while maintaining accessibility on a small display without initially hiding it from view, I'd love to take a look.

I've said it plenty of times. Just look back to around 2011-2013, before iOS7 entered the scene, where many of its change-for-the-sake-of-change over-minimalist interface follies hadn't yet poisoned design beyond the iPhone/iPad.

And since you said it yourself, perhaps the biggest problem are the customers who I bet just want to keep up with the Joneses and make sure they're not lagging behind what everybody else is doing, where everybody is doing what Apple is doing, so therefore it must be the right way.

 

[RedTomato]

I'll try to start keeping notes for when I come across a site with a flair of minimized function icons hiding all kinds of features/functions that are kind of difficult to intuitively know what's underneath them.

No need to look far. I often find Facebook baffling when looking for options or actions.

The other day I had to delete some spam posts on a group I run. No indication anywhere of how to do so.

I had to go & ask someone 20 years younger than me to show me. Turns out there is a hidden three dots action menu. To make it appear you have to hover your mouse over exactly the right spot somewhere near the relevant post. (And know in advance where to hover it.)

I choose to regard it as Facebook's valuable contribution towards encouraging real world intergenerational interaction.

 

[Tozovac]

I had to go & ask someone 20 years younger than me to show me. Turns out there is a hidden three dots action menu. To make it appear you have to hover your mouse over exactly the right spot somewhere near the relevant post. (And know in advance where to hover it.)

Thank you for mentioning that. I wanted to also mention about the third confusing option for hiding functions behind in addition to the gear and hamburger icons -- the three dots, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical. Just tonight I was trying to find the security settings in dropbox so I could change a few things around. Accessed the dropbox website from my iPad, since obviously a mobile device is now the best place to go for an optimized viewing session. Let the hunting (and timer) begin: since a clear button or link for security isn't on the main page any more (to make room for plenty of white space), is it behind the three dots in the lower right corner? Spent a while looking, answer: no. Could it be behind the flat design dropbox logo in the upper left corner, where nowadays you can ever be certain if something flat is an actionable item or just decoration? Answer: no. Where the hell is it? I shouldn't have to Google it just to find out, right? Thinking there's no way it could be, I press the smiley face, and....there's an option for Settings. More clicking, let's try it. Security - ok so 5-6 clicks and 1-2 minutes later I found what I was looking for. Obviously, listing a menu'd arrangement of popular functions at the top or bottom of the page was not worth it.

Yep, great design days we're living in. So glad also that dropbox stuck to the now completely boring light blue font on whiteground fad that all the cool kids are doing nowadays. The oversized spacing between text and overall layout looks like what you would have seen in 2000 in an introduction to the internet class in 1st grade. Is this really the best we can do?

The hamburger (navigation menu) and head (account/profile) icons are pretty ubiquitous these days

That's one thing you're right about. I just wonder sometimes how fun a designer's job must be nowadays to be hamstrung to the same blue and white (and sometimes splashes of light gray to shake things up) theme, where so many sites need look alike from 10 feet. A little hamburger here, a gear or 3 ellipses there, a head up top and you're done. It's like 1996 and Netscape all over again.

I'm hoping it won't take years, but I'm looking forward to the rebellion when good, interesting, and intuitive design returns.

 

[RedTomato]

I just wonder sometimes how fun a designer's job must be nowadays to be hamstrung to the same blue and white (and sometimes splashes of light gray to shake things up) theme, where so many sites need look alike from 10 feet. A little hamburger here, a gear or 3 ellipses there, a head up top and you're done. It's like 1996 and Netscape all over again.

I'm hoping it won't take years, but I'm looking forward to the rebellion when good, interesting, and intuitive design returns.

I don't think so. I think it's a sign of the maturity of the web. In the early days it was 'wow, a website!', today the product is the focus, and a flashy website will distract from the product.

Look at newspapers, books and wall-hung art. The difference between two books lies in the content, a 'hero' image on the cover, and very slight differences in formatting. The difference between two pieces of wall-hung art is in the content, not the frame which nowadays is generally very low key compared to the ornate gold leafed gaudy frames of the past. Ditto newspapers etc.

Illuminated book (from when a book was a wow thing, a status symbol thing to have) vs a modern book:

Old art frame (from when a painting was a wow thing, a status symbol thing to have) vs a modern frame (also note the greater use of white space to highlight the central content, rather than the frame ):

As always there's exemptions for modern arthouse books and specialist examples of the framer's skill etc.

EDIT: apologies if the images are too big.

 

[Tozovac]

I don't think so. I think it's a sign of the maturity of the web. In the early days it was 'wow, a website!', today the product is the focus, and a flashy website will distract from the product.

Look at newspapers, books and wall-hung art. The difference between two books lies in the content, a 'hero' image on the cover, and very slight differences in formatting. The difference between two pieces of wall-hung art is in the content, not the frame which nowadays is generally very low key compared to the ornate gold leafed gaudy frames of the past. Ditto newspapers etc.

I don't know that I agree with your comparators.

I'd say iOS7-11 and the "refined web that's all white with blue font" is more like taping a white poster image with very little detail onto the wall and with no frame whatsoever. Very minimalist, with "no more being there that needs to be there." But iOS6 and web design which had some more unique creativity to them are more like hanging a colorful photo or painting on the wall even with a just a simple black wood frame (but at least with a frame). There are large differences between the two. There is no way you can claim today's borderless ios7-11/"new web" design is like a photo with an actual frame, even if you cleverly used a white frame above.

I'm not buying that today's all-white with blue/grey font and hero images and hidden functions under hamburger/gear/face/ellipses icons are ideal, just like hamstringing a website accessed by desktop/laptop users to a format that's optimized for a small mobile device is not ideal. They are just the fad of the half-decade that all uncreative managers are seeming to succumb to, to keep up with the Joneses. Same thing happens with automakers, where now everyone is pumping out cars with high beltlines, random sheet metal creases that often make no cohesive sense, and blacked-out large badge/shield grilles up front copied from Audi to the point they all look disinterestingly alike compared to 10-20 years ago when you could tell a Honda from a GM product from a Volvo product from a hundred feet away. Like mobile devices/operating systems, auto design is so highly-evolved they're running out of room for innovation. The stakes are so high for survival in these mature markets that nobody seems willing to risk something different, and they just wind up making things looking all alike for fear of failure...ignoring the victory that's possible by being winningly unique and standing out from the crowd (like Apple products felt before ~2013).

You're cherry picking "gaudiness" and thinking solely of some of the overboard skeu details of iOS6 and web design of 15+ years ago. We're currently caught up in an odd over-minimalistic fad that too many lemmings-like marketing managers are afraid to be the first to deviate from. This will hopefully come & go and settle back into something with a lot more uniqueness and intuitiveness and interesting design sooner than later.

 

[fig]

You're cherry picking "gaudiness" and thinking solely of some of the overboard skeu details of iOS6 and web design of 15+ years ago. We're currently caught up in an odd over-minimalistic fad that too many lemmings-like marketing managers are afraid to be the first to deviate from. This will hopefully come & go and settle back into something with a lot more uniqueness and intuitiveness and interesting design sooner than later.

On the flip side, it feels like you're cherry picking websites that are "awful".

You're not going to find a lot of visual innovation from massive companies with marketing and data driven sites whose primary goal is convert sales.

You've also pigeonholed responsive sites as badly designed, but those are designed that way for reasons that have been mentioned many times in this conversation.

There are still lots of people doing interesting, artistic things on the web, they just aren't doing them on sites that have to process thousands of users an hour and convert them to sales.

 

[Tozovac]

On the flip side, it feels like you're cherry picking websites that are "awful".

You're not going to find a lot of visual innovation from massive companies with marketing and data driven sites whose primary goal is convert sales.

You've also pigeonholed responsive sites as badly designed, but those are designed that way for reasons that have been mentioned many times in this conversation.

There are still lots of people doing interesting, artistic things on the web, they just aren't doing them on sites that have to process thousands of users an hour and convert them to sales.

I'm not asking for innovation and don't think innovation is needed if a site works well. I'm asking for the return of good non-faddish design that yes, some sites are still using and doing things well. There are just many other sites doing things so poorly, seemingly blindly following the white/blue/spaced-out fad that itself may have been an attempt to innovate beyond what used to work pretty well. In fact, many of them aren't even all about making a sale on that visit (like dropbox and paypal well after you've created an account), so it's not accurate to use the "must not entertain/distract customer, must make them move and think and buy quickly" excuse.

Amazon is a great example of a good site still doing things well, maybe the best I can offer. It's gently morphed with the times and occasionally trending more flat than say 5 years ago, but it's avoided several design sins that are the root of my critiques:

1. It's retained its basic layout for years. It was created well, it works well, it's aging well, and gentle refinements are implemented slowly, effectively, and for a reason that's not just for eye candy. This "do it right the first time then refine" was the Apple of pre-iOS7/2013.
2. It's retained a desktop/laptop-centric design that uses well the screen area available and usage of a mouse, instead of handicapping it to be a mobile-centric layout.
3. It's not morphed to an all-white frameless/borderless presentation with light-colored font (it smartly uses colors & "zones" to almost subconsciously guide the user and give that sense of "it just works")
4. It's not gone completely 100% flat just because Apple and some others did.
5. It uses bold font often, not uber-thin hard to focus-on font.
6. It's retained the use of key buttons that look like buttons and help the user realize where actionable key functions are.
7. It's retained an actual search "window/box" in plain sight that you can click into just once and start typing instead instead of following the followers by using a magnifying glass icon requiring two clicks, one to unhide the window/box text and then one for typing in it.
7a. The white search window/box doesn't have words like "Enter text here" or "Search" in darkish font pre-filled out which often confuse you into thinking you need to first delete that text.
8. It's retained individual popular/typical functions or actions up top and in plain sight so that only one click is all that's needed to get going, rather than hide them behind a hamburger/ellipses/gear icon for that supposed "clean/minimal interface" that requires 2 or 3 clicks each time.
9. Those items in #8 are specifically located up top so that you can perform 99% of the interactions you need from Amazon at first-look and without having to scroll down and hunt/look around. It's utterly amazing how many web designers today have forgotten the usefulness of seeing everything or at least 99% of everything you need to view at the first page load and without having to scroll up-and-down and up-and-down to get the full picture.
10. It's retained a stacked list of other popular functions at the bottom, and arranged smartly close together and not with a bunch of wasted space requiring more scrolling than you should need.

Websites that blow most or all those items are too numerous. Too much wasted space...thin fonts but with lots of wasted space, sacrificing the ability to see plenty of info on one screen (dropbox & paypal are especially bad compared to their prior layouts that used text/lines more efficiently)...mobile-centric-looking-screen-space-wasting layouts...
Dropbox.com
paypal.com
Microsoft.com
intel.com
cnet.com

I'll add others as I think of them.

 

[Tozovac]

1. It's retained its basic layout for years. It was created well, it works well, it's aging well, and gentle refinements are implemented slowly, effectively, and for a reason that's not just for eye candy. This "do it right the first time then refine" was the Apple of pre-iOS7/2013.
2. It's retained a desktop/laptop-centric design that uses well the screen area available and usage of a mouse, instead of handicapping it to be a mobile-centric layout.
3. It's not morphed to an all-white frameless/borderless presentation with light-colored font (it smartly uses colors & "zones" to almost subconsciously guide the user and give that sense of "it just works")
4. It's not gone completely 100% flat just because Apple and some others did.
5. It uses bold font often, not uber-thin hard to focus-on font.
6. It's retained the use of key buttons that look like buttons and help the user realize where actionable key functions are.
7. It's retained an actual search "window/box" in plain sight that you can click into just once and start typing instead instead of following the followers by using a magnifying glass icon requiring two clicks, one to unhide the window/box text and then one for typing in it.
7a. The white search window/box doesn't have words like "Enter text here" or "Search" in darkish font pre-filled out which often confuse you into thinking you need to first delete that text.
8. It's retained individual popular/typical functions or actions up top and in plain sight so that only one click is all that's needed to get going, rather than hide them behind a hamburger/ellipses/gear icon for that supposed "clean/minimal interface" that requires 2 or 3 clicks each time.
9. Those items in #8 are specifically located up top so that you can perform 99% of the interactions you need from Amazon without even having to scroll down and hunt/look around.
10. It's retained a stacked list of other popular functions at the bottom, and arranged smartly close together and not with a bunch of wasted space requiring more scrolling than you should need.

Not a single response for weeks? Maybe my top 10 list above has struck a chord.

I maintain that any desktop/laptop-viewed site adhering to my list of 1-10 above will stand the test of time have a good shot at being considered very simple & efficient to work with by users of many various skills & preferences. Website design is pretty dang matured within today's hardware offerings (screen resolution, screen size, touch/non-touch screen, mouse/trackpad/touchscreen, etc.) and those who try to invent new and simplified approaches beyond what was highly optimized & nearly perfected 4-5 years ago fail just too often IMHO, as discussed in many threads above. Consider musical instruments - how many new instruments have successfully been introduced in the past 100 years? What's been added beyond things that had been invented sometimes many centuries ago like brass/woodwind/reeded instruments, violins/guitars, pianos, drums/percussion, etc? Maybe the electric guitar in the 40's/50's and synthesizer/sampler in the 70's can count, but both of those are light variants of the long-existing technologies of guitar & piano. What "new instrument" has been invented in the past 100 years that's stood the test of time? Theremin? I'd say today's minimalist too-white dumbed-down flat design fad is equivalent to the theremin - something different but no real improvement over what's been invented long ago and no long-term holding power once users clamor for something new yet again and designers revert back to "the basics."

 

[fig]

I think it's much more because you're kind of a broken record on this topic and there's no real point trying to discuss anything.

But if you want to feel like you've "won", then congrats.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

Yeah, I guess I don't understand the point of the thread? Is there that many web developers on Macrumors.com that this thread will single-handedly turn back the responsive nature of the average website in the year 2017? When Google has said that it will give presumption to mobile-first websites (i.e., responsive)? I know my website, I changed wordpress to display more text across the screen and widen the website overall when using a high-resolution device (such as a desktop/laptop), but not everyone will do that.

So, what is the point of the thread? Get off my lawn, you darn kids? If so, then, no, I still don't agree. Responsive layouts have been a huge time-saver for devs.

 

[Tozovac]

So, what is the point of the thread? Get off my lawn, you darn kids? If so, then, no, I still don't agree. Responsive layouts have been a huge time-saver for devs.

Three points really.

My main point #1 was to get an explanation for why so many ease-of-use & stylistic features that I personally strongly prefer and consider to be the cornerstone of a responsive, efficient, attractive, intuitive, and fun to use website (summarized 1-10 earlier) are being so wholesale white-washed away.

I think that goal was mostly met. I read enough reasoning by others about "responsive websites" even if I don't necessarily agree with how any purported gains are worth what I believe to be some pretty significant trade-offs. However, I've seen zero rationale yet (as I kind of expected) for making websites all-white and virtually borderless to where it's often unclear at first glance whether some text is in regards to a picture above the text or below it, and with light blue/grey font to boot on a blinding white background. You'd swear no Apple engineer ever tried using their phone outdoors in sunlight.

but not everyone will do that.

A secondary point #2 was to see if I heard from others who agree with me in part or whole. I'd say that point was met also.

I think it's much more because you're kind of a broken record on this topic and there's no real point trying to discuss anything.

But if you want to feel like you've "won", then congrats.

Thanks for the bump. A third point #3 is stress relief / therapy by complaining about what I consider to be a misguided and short-sighted fad, receiving some relief by knowing others agree and fueling a fantasy that at least one Apple employee in a position of power stumbles upon my & others' rants and it plants a seed to get a step closer to the return of good, complete design that looks like an Apple product designed by Apple engineers (and not a windows or android Apple-wannabe-product) once again !

Product design is fickle & faddish, and decades on this planet have shown me that what's once new will get old and what's old will be revived as new again one day...so it's laughable to think about the inevitability of Apple's marketing dept clamoring for something new and then seeing how Jony's team backpedals from today's stripped down UIx, where there's not that much more they can strip away other than going monochrome or with VGA levels of pixel resolution.

Knowing that anything Apple does is repeated ad nauseum by competitors & web designers, I just hope Apple returns to prioritizing function over fashion and brightens up past all this minimalistic homogenous-white-and-light-blue-and-grey design schlock, returning to catering more towards the screen/device than mobile-first. Maybe Apple will hire some new upstart designer who realizes that some pretty smart people before 2013 developed some pretty good UIx principles, and he strives to make a name for himself by fixing all that Jony had taketh away and poisoned so many other designer lemmings...

It will be interesting to see how Apple them unpaints themselves out of the minimalism corner they've painted themselves into, and then how the web design world responds.

Like you say, "not everyone will do that," and that's too often (to me) a real detriment to a good experience.


Interesting (for some) link: http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/

"I’m not against change, but so much change today confers no real benefit."

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

I completely agree. I wanted to add that what else bothers me is the eventual stripping away of options and information. Websites used to be very rich in information, with details and long walls of text. I know that's not for everyone, but for some people – i.e., me – it worked very well. I was able to have all the information I needed in front of me. I didn't have to contact their respective customer care department to ask for clarification or ask for an form to be emailed my way. These days, websites are geared more and more for the simplistic mindset – e.g., mobile – and has chipped away more and more valuable information.

I miss full websites that had loads of information and seemed to be full of effort. Today's websites are mostly junk and look like minimal effort was put into it, IMO. Amazon still stands out as really good and still staying in the pre-2013 era; hopefully, it remains that way. Ironically, back in, say, 2009, there may have been complaints from people back then saying how limited/dumbed down Amazon looked, haha.

 

[Tozovac]

Ironically, back in, say, 2009, there may have been complaints from people back then saying how limited/dumbed down Amazon looked, haha.

I wonder, but I sincerely doubt it. I don't think there was that much unnecssary over-thinking and short-sighted over-criticizing then as there is now since ~2012-2013. I liken it to: it's as if the web/iOS/OSX design world hit puberty around 2005 when things really started to feel good and useful, followed by sailing thru a pretty glamorous & exciting & can-do-no-wrong period of late teens & 20's from 2006 to 2011, then into its 30s in 2011-2012 with the passing of Steve Jobs and where things suddenly started just not feeling as right as they did just a short time ago...followed by Jony Ive's polluting iOS and then OSX starting in 2013 (which kicked off all the web design world lemmings to jump on Jony's bandwagon of misguided minimalization whims) being the equivalent of an aging, formerly beautiful person now jumping into too much unnecessary plastic surgery trying to fix things that weren't broken and resulting in some god-awful scary results that just don't look natural. Same thing really in the automotive design world -- automotive design matured IMHO about 10 years ago, and now all cars really look alike, with big black front ends copying Audi's shield grille and wildly random sheet-metal creases along the body. There's not much more room left for innovation, so designers can only randomly dabble with potential new ideas like "floating roofs" and wildly complex headlight sculptures. Spaghetti on the wall, trying to come up with something that sticks. How about musical instruments, what new musical instrument has been invented in the past hundred years that's stuck and become as classic as the violin. That's what today's web design and Apple operating systems feel like after 2013. Providing answers to problems that don't exist but are just different than how things were before.

Can today's silly iOS UI and Fisher-Price-looking OSX be able to be fixed? Only when someone with a time machine mindset dials away all the silly fashion-first mumbo jumbo back a few years and takes us back to something like the glory years...

 

[040]

I agree with pretty much all the points that OP has made. I have not read all the posts here thoroughly, because in my frustration I have been googling for similar opinions for years and I've read it all before. Many of my favorite websites have switched to flatness/mobile first/minimalism/dumbing down/clean/simple designs/all of the above, and all I can keep doing is just hope this is all a fad and it will be gone soon. Unfortunately it takes time.

On a positive note, with regards to iOS, I do sense that Apple designers (and hopefully others will follow) are very slowly getting it right again. The immediate years following iOS 7 were just terrible, but the iOS 11 iPad stuff looks somewhat better. Shadows are acceptable again, button shapes and contrast are being brought back.

Web design, however, is still mostly crap.

OP, a few years ago I stumbled upon designer Eli Schiff's blog. His essays on minimalism and the stupidity of designers that blindly follow the flat/simple trend are a must-read if you ask me. While mostly concerning apps and icons, the critiques can also be applied to web design. This guy really put my frustrations into words. Check out some of his other posts as well.
http://www.elischiff.com/blog-1-1/2015/2/2/humanistintroduction-1-1
http://www.elischiff.com/blog-1-1/2015/4/7/fall-of-the-designer-part-i-fashionable-nonsense-1-1
http://www.elischiff.com/blog-1-1/2015/4/14/fall-of-the-designer-part-ii-pixel-pushers-1-1
http://www.elischiff.com/blog-1-1/2015/4/21/fall-of-the-designer-part-iii-responsive-design-1-1
http://www.elischiff.com/blog-1-1/2016/2/9/social-media-whitewash-1-1

 

[Tozovac]

...because in my frustration I have been googling for similar opinions for years and I've read it all before.

OP, a few years ago I stumbled upon designer Eli Schiff's blog. His essays on minimalism and the stupidity of designers that blindly follow the flat/simple trend are a must-read if you ask me. While mostly concerning apps and icons, the critiques can also be applied to web design. This guy really put my frustrations into words.

Thank you. Such familiar sentiment...I'll occasionally google "jony ive idiot"..."flat design terrible"..."apple no longer just works +UIx", etc.....looking for other like-minded consumers who get what we get. Makes me feel better in the short term while we await the ship getting righted once again, like calamine lotion on poison ivy. I did stumble on one of Schiff's blogs a while ago ("part i") but didn't see the others so I'm really glad you pointed them out! Thank you! I keep hoping to stumble upon that one blog by someone of influence who helps to finally start that groundswell of support to topple this awful (and played-out) flat/white fad, similar to the raising of pitchforks & torches over green felt, woodgrain, and buttony-looking buttons that resulted in flatness, gradients, and non-buttony-looking-buttons.

Where are the voices of reason? Do the majority not care (yet), have they given up, or are they keeping shut since they've learned it's possible that the next reinvention could actually get worse.

Or hopefully like you point out, maybe there will be a slow shift back, where Apple (and all the lemmings that shall follow) sheepishly keep returning towards the good...even if nobody admits it openly.

I'll really enjoy reading those other entries more in-depth this weekend, thanks again. This one too is one of my favorites still:
http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/


Not to toot my own horn but I got a real kick out of how one item in your 4th link parroted one of my earlier statements nearly exactly:

Me:

I liken it to: it's as if the web/iOS/OSX design world hit puberty around 2005 when things really started to feel good and useful, followed by sailing thru a pretty glamorous & exciting & can-do-no-wrong period of late teens & 20's from 2006 to 2011, then into its 30s in 2011-2012 with the passing of Steve Jobs and where things suddenly started just not feeling as right as they did just a short time ago...

Him (done more much succinctly & cleverly):

 

[040]

but didn't see the others so I'm really glad you pointed them out

Yeah man definitely check out the rest of his articles. I skipped some of them if they were too meta, e.g. how designers respond to each other's critiques on Twitter. I don't really care too much about that, I just hope the majority of them wake the hell up. A groundswell, like you said. But Apple leads the way.

For readers of this thread that want a tl;dr, here are my favorite parts that offer an explanation of the current state of web design:

"It is possible that there has been a revolution in the way users understand digital designs, leading to a justified repudiation of longstanding principles. But mounting evidence shows instead that modern minimalists are papering over an ignorance of aesthetics and usability, the means by which users ultimately engage with machines. In lieu of those principles, modern minimalist designers build misleadingly simple, objectively less usable designs that happen to be fast to produce, convenient and cheap."
(from: http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/2/2/humanistintroduction)

"The designers of these public redesigns took Apple at their word that it is best to use oddly matched, over-saturated colors, with an emphasis on bright white whenever possible. Palettes that draw the eye and distract, rather than remain muted and calm. Thin fonts and elements that predictably struggle to scale legibly without jagged, aliased edges. These designers made every effort to disguise the now criminal presence of dimensional representation. In sum, these designers reduced anything that might arbitrarily be deemed ornamental, and exhibited excess in all the worst places."
[..]
"Few have mounted a worthy defense of what we have lost. And more than that, the majority appear optimistic about the way things are moving. As it happens, I have the utmost respect for many of the figures I reference. Most, if not all, are incredibly skilled practitioners. But having embraced flat design, they place significant constraints on their ability to use those talents. The reason I include quotes by these leaders is to expose the consensus in the design community with regard to modern minimalism. More than that, I aim to show that it is a meme which continues to pass on largely unquestioned."
(from: http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/3/4/critical-sharks-part-i-you-cant-say-that)

"Today, responsive techniques allow design practitioners and engineers to argue that the centrally important aspect of digital design is whether it adapts to multiple screens using fluid layouts to the exclusion of any other need. Thus application design has suffered greatly from lackluster responsive and mobile-first approaches. Instead of optimizing designs to each platform and usage paradigm, now designs tend to be one size fits all. Material Design is a good example of this. There is a big trend among designers to redesign websites to fit into the Material Design framework, not realizing that Material Design was specifically intended to be optimized for phone and tablet usage. In this way it would be just as foolish to redesign everything on OS X to look like iOS with giant buttons and iOS-like hierarchies. Instead, these designers miss the advantages and competencies that each unique platform offers and instead provide users a reductive approach to design."
[..]
"Similar to web design, application design is becoming homogenized. [..] Did these developers suddenly have an epiphany and conclude that their former designs were ugly and overwrought? Or was it instead an imposed, though convenient, ideological shift by operating system designers? The most logical explanation is that these app companies did not come to some sudden realization that their prior aesthetic was faulty and impure, but instead predicted that sticking to expressive aesthetics would make them no longer appear current and trendy. Ultimately, not appearing current is a grave offense to those with a modernist avant garde sensibility."
(from: http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/21/fall-of-the-designer-part-iii-responsive-design)

 

[Tozovac]

I'm still waiting for any one good reason why the light gray text on a blinding white background fad is a good idea. I doubt that anybody has one to offer other than Google or Jony did it, therefore it must be good. Such garbage. The following website is almost impossible to read without inverting screen colors, it seems like one out of every three or four websites is almost this bad.

https://www.kaitlinvitt.com/ukraine/2017/8/29/why-i-moved-to-ukraine-for-10-months

 

[olup]

Instead of nitpicking and finger pointing these past two months, you could have made a significant contribution to the web by starting to learn how to make websites more accessible/legible and nicer to look at.

 

[pixelatedscraps]

You guys obviously haven't seen many Hong Kong government / state-sponsored websites in your time. Let's all take a trip back to 1998 as we look at the Hong Kong Government's current weather website for 2017...and yes, they're all like that here:

http://www.hko.gov.hk