I've never considered not using autofill.
That's my favorite part.
Perhaps that's why this new bank website has switched to this multi-page login scheme. It prevents lazy people like me from autofilling passwords.
Maybe it's a good thing.
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Why is website design so awful today, generally?
- Thread starter Tozovac
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I've never considered not using autofill.
That's my favorite part.
Perhaps that's why this new bank website has switched to this multi-page login scheme. It prevents lazy people like me from autofilling passwords.
Maybe it's a good thing.
I agree that there's a lot of terrible sites out there, but I don't agree that responsive design is responsible for there being so many bad sites out there today. The kind of sites that Tozovac's complaining about seem to fit into the "lazy designer" or "least worst choice" method of designing sites.
The MVMT Watches site that kicked off this discussion has a very obvious reason for why the design is so chunky and inefficient. It's a Shopify site. It's a DIY site and if you take a closer look at a lot of sites that look similar, you'll find a lot of them are DIY sites. They're sites built on WIX, Weebly, SquareSpace, and other similar platforms. DIY sites have always been bad. They're actually less bad than the DIY sites of old, but still bad.
Fewer and fewer people are hiring real designers these days so you're naturally going to see a lot of DIY sites that simply use a color by numbers approach. You can make responsive sites that are good for both desktop and mobile. I have a number of sites that were made in the "Web 2.0" days of mature desktop design and I was able to successfully convert a number of them into mobile friendly sites without completely dismantling the original design. It was a hell of a lot of work, but worth it in my book.
The MVMT Watches site that kicked off this discussion has a very obvious reason for why the design is so chunky and inefficient. It's a Shopify site. It's a DIY site and if you take a closer look at a lot of sites that look similar, you'll find a lot of them are DIY sites. They're sites built on WIX, Weebly, SquareSpace, and other similar platforms. DIY sites have always been bad. They're actually less bad than the DIY sites of old, but still bad.
Fewer and fewer people are hiring real designers these days so you're naturally going to see a lot of DIY sites that simply use a color by numbers approach. You can make responsive sites that are good for both desktop and mobile. I have a number of sites that were made in the "Web 2.0" days of mature desktop design and I was able to successfully convert a number of them into mobile friendly sites without completely dismantling the original design. It was a hell of a lot of work, but worth it in my book.
Good thoughts, but I’m not so sure that professionals within certain companies aren’t also making similar spaghetti on the wall design decision, just to follow the fad and flavor of the day. I continue to contend that this space wasting mobile centric focus is just not an efficient and intuitive and fun design in the big picture, and will always result in an elegant and tedious websites like:
Www.simplisafe.com
Just try to quickly get a feel for where to start logically first if you were shopping for one of their systems and wanting to learn more.
On the other hand, it’s already been 5 awful years with iOS 7 which kicked off this blight of unnecessary minimalism that’s ruined the look and interaction of software. As I knew this fad would pass eventually also, signs are thankfully showing that we may start to see the return of smart design focused on function and not appearance:
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/04/03/michael-flarup-designer-bringing-bring-skeumorphism-back/
Now if only critics and fans didn’t lump things like stitched leather in with the idea of designing for function first over fashion when they think skeuomorphism when arguing for the return of smart and intuitive design. If only there was a way to differentiate the two. As much as I long for calendar, iTunes/Music, and Mail apps on my iPhone that are exactly like iOS 6’s instead of the crap unintuitive over-dabbled messes we’ve been stuck with since 2013, I can do with or without the stitched leather garnish, makes no difference to me. Why is there no way to make the distinction between a bolder, more obvious, detailed and intuitive software experience versus skeumorphism’s physical garnishes that sure, can border on silliness while being tolerable for many, but then be fingernails on chalkboard for some who have no patience when they hear others like me long for aspects of pre-iOS 7 design that arguably function more intuitively, and therefore, better for many of us?
Just bring back ios and OS X software designed for intuitivity and function first like before 2013, and then, by extension, websites will follow out of this responsive design blockland mess. Oh, and while we’re at it, can we move past all this white, gray, light blue, medium blue madness?
Um, no. I hate hate hate hate hate the mobile version of wikipedia. Same goes for utoob and all the other crappy mobile sites following the latest minimalist trends. With large high-resolution screens and precise capacitive sensing, there is absolutely no need to me for "CLEAN" or "WHITESPACE" or "ENDLESS SCROLLING" or "HAMBURGER MENUS". Uggh. When will these millennial web-developers stop and take a step back? I will always take a "mobile-friendly desktop site" over a "desktop-friendly mobile site". I bought a 27" monitor for a reason, and sorry, but it's not so web devs can fill it with more whitespace. /rant
You picked a couple of very odd sites to hate if what you hate is minimalism, millenials, and modern design trends. Neither of those sites have changed much much and Youtube has far less whitespace today than it did five years ago.
Not everyone has a huge screen, huge monitor, or huge smartphone.
Endless scrolling is overdone. I'll agree with you there. It's a very handy design trend when used properly. It's actually quite handy when used in the right situations. Choosing the right tool for the right job doesn't always happen, but that didn't start with millenials. y'know?
I'm really not sure what your beef with whitespace is. That's nothing new either. What IS new is an abundance of whitespace that's white. I feel like all the color has drained from the Web, which is a shame, but it's not because of hipsters and minimalist chic. Much of the blame goes to the dominance of sites that use affiliated content and user generated content. When you don't control the pipeline of publication or when your site is extremely heavy on visual content, white is pretty much the only color that's safe to use as a background.
You're such a classy chap. While you have the floor, what else would you like to blame on younger generations?
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Did I blame anything on younger generations? Clearly I'm speaking of (post-) millenium (aka 'y2k') era of web development which has been going on for 18 years. And like you said, is not new new.
I would have chosen a different example. The old Apple forums looks awful.
So does the current one and I have to agree that the current one is worse. The old one, while it may have been ugly, but at least it's easier to read and scan.
The current one is both ugly and difficult to read on anything, but a smartphone.
Yeah, those things you brought up are annoying, but I have a hunch for why you're seeing that from Apple and other companies. It's because that design pattern works.
It just doesn't work for what you're looking at. It may not even work for most things, but they chose that look because it works for their main branding items and most companies follow design standards that specify that everything produced for the company needs to have certain characteristics. Usually there's a short list of fonts that are acceptible, exact colors that may be used, and so forth.
That's great for consistency and it's important to do this, but they may not have threshed out their design standards to cover what they consider secondary areas. Either that or they did what a lot of designers do when pitching a design. They designed around a best case scenario and sold that look in design meetings instead of putting together demos based on the lowest common denominator. I can picture some scenarios in which the Apple Forums would look stellar done like that... I just wouldn't expect to find too many of those cases in the wild.
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That's reasonable, but I don't think that's what most people hear when you cite "millenials" as a cause for trends you don't like.
Another unecessarily aggravating website, subjecting a user to need to scroll down then back up a few times on the way down just to take in and verify what was available at this page, wasting 10 seconds being subjected to "art" that probably pleased the web designer more than any subsequent website user:
https://www.eastcentral.aaa.com/travel/aaa-travel.html#hertzgold
What's the over/under before we return to websites designed for users and not website designers? January 2020 maybe?
Another thing I find, is when I get new website clients now, their main focus is not their customer, but rather what they perceive to be their competition. They are mainly concerned with one-upping their competitor's website so the competitor will take notice. If their competition does actually have a good website, it is usually because of their high-end custom photography (content) coupled with easy stylistic/logical navigation.
Unfortunately "most" new clients I get are trying to compete out of their league too early - they have almost no budget for a website to begin with and rely 100% on Stock Photos - if someone wants to see stock images, just visit a stock image site! Most memorable websites IMO start with great custom photos that communicate something unique about the client's product or service and shot with the website design in mind.
More and more I recommend to clients to consider a DIY template system as they cannot afford "custom" solutions. Honestly most of them don't even need a "website" as they have no "content". Furthermore, most of the things they are asking for will not bring them new customers or revenue, they don't even know why they want certain things when I question them... they just say "well they have that", so that must be the secret!
Very insightful. If I interpret correctly, it confirms one of my theories that 1) “somebody” influential introduced grand images (or video) filling up the screen (or screens if you have to scroll heavily to take in the entire loaded page) — which seemed fresh and different to everyone, then 2) suddenly everybody started copying, some with skill and resources and some without. Couple that with the (misplaced imho) need to focus on mobile first (instead of focusing on the delivery hardware/screen) and its highly dumbed-down/simplistic and vertical arrangement, and we have the makings for the keeping up with the Joneses mess we have today.
This is the same messup for mobile operating systems and mobile apps — Apple comes up with an overly simplistic, flat design with iOS 7, and everybody, and I mean every app and web designer has to copy, many with little talent and little understanding of UIx which is truly needed to rescue the awfully unintuitive-by-nature ios7-11, resulting in highly intuitive and cumbersome apps and websites that try to fit the mold instead of fit what’s naturally best for the user.
PS - for the link I gave above, one needs to put in a local ZIP Code to see the same results I did. Try the ZIP Code 16066. Then, as far as custom images, let’s assume the photo of a camera and then a car in a narrow street below that are custom images. What value do these two images provide to the website other than eye candy which after the first enjoyment, just adds to the vertical scrolling?
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You are right, in that case (because of the mobile-first building-blocks), the enormous length of the page, etc., it is ill placed. It would be better if it were incorporated into a pertinent information block (like the camera above it). In fact it might actually assist someone in relocating some associated info as a picture is easy to remember compared to an endless string of text info. That entire site is pretty much hopeless for easy access on any device.
I am not sure any mobile-first layout is really user-friendly unless it contains a minimal amount of info and options and a few menu selections.
That said, it is not going away, probably only going to get worse - and I see very little a "designer" can do to improve the navigation on an endless strand of spaghetti. A small screen is just not a good platform for a website - and now I am seeing responsive iWatch requests! It is like taking all the furniture in your house and stacking it into a bedroom and hoping your guests will be impressed when they visit. Websites in the old days were such a challenge even on desktop real-estate, that "menus" had to be added with associated "pages" to mimic print layouts. That is not practical on mobile devices. There is a reason printed "books" fall within a size range and are a joy to read and why small fine print instruction manuals you get are an exercise in frustration!
This is more of a cultural addiction than a design opportunity. It is a real dilemma for people who have dedicated themselves to quality design, but have been given such a limiting amount of real-estate. It would be like hiring an architect to design your dream home and saying he only has a 10-foot x 10-foot plot of land to work with - the only solution is "up" - not what most people "dream" of. You just won't be able to get to the bedroom without going through the kitchen and garage first - it is more a "quest" to prove you can struggle through it to reach your destination than a thing of enjoyment and relaxation. Hence, this is why I can't get the deadbeats to get up off the machines at the gym where I workout, because they take root and scroll for 30 minutes at a go!
I've been doing that all along. I often tell people to only come back after they've made an attempt to build it themselves using something like Wix or Squarespace. There are two reasons I do this. I really don't want someone to hire me if they have any chance of doing it themselves. Second, I want them to understand that what I do is difficult and it's not just about matching a pretty picture and slapping together some code and spiking it with some random animations. The ones who've tried and failed are usually easier to work with.
Blame the people hiring the designers. I'd wager that the designers were just as sick as you were of people wanting their work to borrow from Apple's design language. I know I was. When I interviewed people to show me designs they wanted their sites to resemble, almost everyone listed apple.com as a design example.
Again, don't be so quick to chastise designers. That AAA site has poor project planning and too many cooks in the kitchen written all over it. The AAA site looks like an unfortunate collision between low information density design and high information density design. They were trying to have it both ways. Pick ONE.
It's also a terrible use of parallax design. I could use that site as a case study of how NOT to do parallax design.
More often than not, designers are fellow victims and not the perpetrators of the things you hate.
Sorry... could not even view the site without entering my zipcode ( a popdown covered the AAA text and would not let me cancel ). Yep, I would agree, pretty horrible design.
https://www.eastcentral.aaa.com/travel/aaa-travel.html#hertzgold
Site looks good to me.
This whole thread reads like a bunch of 50 something frustrated developers who fell in love with the visual designs of decades ago and now hold on to them like the unquestionable truth.
Site looks good to me.
This whole thread reads like a bunch of 50 something frustrated developers who fell in love with the visual designs of decades ago and now hold on to them like the unquestionable truth.
seems to me people are in "the box" way too much.
no matter how innovated we want to be, anything out side this "box" is a risk.
when i typed SS that meant style sheet
i left the web design industry when we were forced to use that code for all webpage design.
now anyone can code images with our having photoshop on their PC, and that shows.
people think their smart phone can capture a scene better than a SLR camera should.
the bottom line i think is money, these steps save time, employees and money.
no matter how innovated we want to be, anything out side this "box" is a risk.
when i typed SS that meant style sheet
i left the web design industry when we were forced to use that code for all webpage design.
now anyone can code images with our having photoshop on their PC, and that shows.
people think their smart phone can capture a scene better than a SLR camera should.
the bottom line i think is money, these steps save time, employees and money.
At least one person likes it.
Whoa there fella. I love design that drives the user to click the 'buy' option as quickly as possible. There are tons of articles / studies on it. It seems none of them were read by the AAA team.
Deleted as it was a mean comment because I am hangry.
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i get a closetful of that sometimes!
hava sneekers bar, filled with skinky shoelaces and chew nougat
Ha ha. But still, your having thought that is proof others feel that, some of who are unfortunately in charge of designing "less than easy to use" (IMHO) websites...
All I can say is, I know good web design when I see it, and I know awful web design when I see it.
All I know the web & my computer and iPhone felt full of well-designed website (and iOS operating system and apps) content around the time I got my first iPad or iPhone (~2010 I think), but starting around 2013 website design (and iOS/apps) started down this vague, flat, space-wasting, vertical, scrolling-happy path that seemed to require more guesswork and investigating than before and which just feels really cumbersome at times. Especially noticeable is having to take time to fully see what's in front of you to then start using it, further especially when something you're looking for is not readily apparent amongst all the wasted blank space but is buried under some menu for sake of "clean interface."
(Just last night it took me minutes to find how to switch a credit card from paper to e-statements, since reaching that function was very unintuitively buried under one of just a few customer-service given to the user instead of spelling out user-options more explicitly on the "main" account screen like used to be the norm. This whole "explore and find" thing sounds good maybe in marketing meetings when looking for the next best thing, but is awful IMHO for the user experience. Same old rant but same old unintuitive/cumbersome problems, regardless of age of user.
Do try 16066 to see what I saw.
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Just because something evolves doesn't mean it's better. I don't recall being frustrated as much then as now, so I think the rose-colored glasses statement is a bit off the mark. Certainly, I didn't get many calls at all from my relatives and parents new to iPad until after around 2013/2014 when the "users no longer need obvious/intuitive buttons and design cues" fallacy poisoned iOS and then websites, so there is something afoot here that isn't being considered by too many.
I point to Apple/iOS in a thread about websites because Apple is the leader that too many lemmings designers follow, and their minimalist software design whims since 2013 have been adopted and reworked a bit too far IMHO into the world of websites. Maybe Jony Ive's relatives don't bother calling him when they're stumped with how to work something on their phone or navigate an iOS7-11-looking blue & white flat website where the usable/functional aspects get lost in a sea pretty pictures and blank white/blue/grey space.
Parallax design is otherwise known as a design whose main method of navigation is scrolling instead of clicking. That AAA site most definitely uses parallax design. It appears to me like a site that might have been solid in the concept phase, but got crapified by too many stakeholders having power to force changes.
So, I agree with you that the OP's and other people's complaints sound like people who think everything was always better before. I've been building websites either as a hobby or professionally since the first days of the Web. I see no dramatic increase in the prevalance of badly designed websites. They were just badly designed in other ways before.
Bad design used to look bad. I mean really bad. It looked so bad you felt sorry for whoever did it or paid for that work before you closed out your browser and went somewhere else. Now bad design often looks visually attractive because we have so many strong design patterns to borrow from and robust templates that can be setup (badly) even by novices.
I think that bad design can appear to be pleasing leads more people to be offended by it because they no longer recognize it as simply being bad design, but as something that is attempting to insult their intelligence. It looks so good that it gives you the impression that somebody out there thought that if they threw up some pretty pictures and fancy fonts, most people would be too placid to care or even notice.
I would argue that people who think design is worse today than it was yesterday are just late to the party. I also think they're wrong. There have never been more people who have an awareness of what design is for and what it's supposed to do. Case in point: a lot of the people commenting in this thread aren't designers, but they have a rather strong awareness of design. I don't think this is a conversation we would be having 20 years ago unless we're shacked up in the headquarters of a design agency.
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look at the new cars on the road today, they look similar and nothing breath taking.
the racing bicycles all look the same dark frame, one color type.
the world produces simplified and inside this "box" things.
of course, websites will look similar now.
functionality was the most important aspect of web design, now just pure analytics.
the racing bicycles all look the same dark frame, one color type.
the world produces simplified and inside this "box" things.
of course, websites will look similar now.
functionality was the most important aspect of web design, now just pure analytics.