"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away"
I installed the new iTunes for my friends dad this weekend when I was helping him with his computer troubles. It took me way too long to find the file menu and it occurred to me in that moment that UI/UX designers have gone too far. In the pursuit of simplicity the marble nose has been chipped off the sculpture.
"Let me push Alt just in case a secret UI shows up" is up there with XKCD's famous "change the screen resolution" troubleshooting strip [1]. It should not be a thing. But here we are.
And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse.
What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog bugs) designers/developers are doing it on purpose. Please stop! Other people have to use your software!
In a funny coincidence, just a few minutes ago I got an email indicating that an off-screen dialog bug I reported on Windows 8 almost three years ago has been fixed. (Actually I think it was fixed early last year in a Windows Technical Preview build - two years after I reported it!)
I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match:
When Windows 8 introduced the new file copy/move/delete dialogs, it also introduced a bug. With this monitor arrangement, the dialog would be displayed offscreen:
Just like in the XKCD, the modal dialog locked up the File Explorer window that had opened the dialog. After running into this many times I figured out a workaround using keyboard shortcuts to move the dialog back onscreen.
Pops up a menu in the corner of the active window with Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close. If the window is off screen, the menu should pop up within screen bounds anyway.
Also accessible by right clicking a titlebar, for anybody who's familiar with that one.
IMHO Apple's user interfaces have been getting less intuitive and more buggy with every release. I actually had to use Google to figure out how to disable shuffle on my iPhone.
Another annoyance with iTunes is that they removed the border. If it's placed over a white background, you can't tell where the iTunes window ends. Minimalism done right can be a beautiful thing. When it's done wrong (it's very difficult to get right), it's a disaster.
Or put longer: hiding functionality with out actually taking away the need to manually interact with the function is a superficial design utility improvement.
Although it's my same intuitive feeling, Your background image is not more important than your navigation bar is a pretty strong assertion without citing studies or presenting some trends in user stories.
Really? You really need studies and trends to decide if the bleedin' obvious is necessary? If your users can't use it, it doesn't matter how pretty it is.
Right. It also depends on the goal for the site. Is the goal to have the user click a signup button? Then maybe a nav bar isn't really important, because you don't want them poking around.
Sadly, I have to agree with the parent comment - it's like "are boobs inherently sexually attractive to men" - you'd think the answer is obvious, but it might surprise you.
It's what science is for, in a nutshell. Not trusting ourselves to not make incorrect assumptions without evidence.
already it's been quite some times that I load a web page, and it appears to be completely blank as the background image was not loaded; Ok, the page may be needing js, so I will enable and reload the page, only to find that the page is still blank .. and then I realize that the content was just there, below all that empty space.
This is a pretty crass statement to make. If the focus is full-on navigability, I agree that contrast in the navigation bar is paramount. Yet, for many sites with simplified features, the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself.
This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The focus shifts from full navigability (logging in, become a host, etc) to searching for a listing.
"...the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself"
The above statement is everything that is wrong with modern visual styling of software. After everything is said and done, software is a tool which people use to accomplish a goal. I would argue that anything that causes friction with that is Bad Design.
As much as some visual/interaction designers may think that "experience is everything", they ignore that they are insisting on manufacturing and enforcing their opinion of what the users experience should be and forget that the user accomplishing their goal is the only experience that matters.
You're right, but there is one key insight you need for your view to be complete: most websites are created to sell you shit - often services, which exist only to be bought. Their actual usefulness is pretty much irrelevant beyond the point people start paying for them. Your ability to use a website / webapp to create value is not something they care about.
As an industry we're hurting ourselves by being in this state of cognitive dissonance. The result is that designers try to apply patterns for selling people shit when they're working on tools, even if given tool is the "real deal" and not meant to drive sales by appearance.
There was a great talk at SXSW last year entitled "The Myth of Reducing Friction in your Product."
Basically, within a given flow (say onboarding or signup), you want to consider having some points of friction interspersed with low friction points. Adding friction in the right places helps to create users who will a)come back and b)will be more active users. The speaker presented some data to back up her assertions.
Getting back to OP's point, the emotional experience is a point of friction that may be worthwhile. Though it may slow down the conversion process or whatever flow the user is supposed to go through, it may result in users who become more attached to the product and ultimately spend more.
The thing is, if the site doesn't make it easy for me to accomplish what I want, then my emotional response is frustration. It doesn't matter how nice or pretty your site is if I get frustrated before I have the chance to appreciate the design.
I think trying to evoke a certain emotional response can really only be effective if it's not getting in the way.
When did sites become "emotional experiences"? I'm sorry I want to say something more constructive but I'm giggling too much at the absurdity of this statement.
Websites are art, the same way that any other creations are. You wouldn't giggle at the idea of a song, a magazine, or a photograph being "emotional experiences", so what makes websites any different?
The emotional experience I have when I go to a site and see a huge image of some stock photo is anger: "Jesus, what fucking moron put this totally useless picture here, and how do I get to the useful portion of this site and do what I need to do?"
I'd like to call out the google analytics splash page as an example that makes me feel this way. Why is it there at all? Why is there a giant image of some irrelevant face on it?
> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.
The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases completion rates -- if you look at your homepage as another page that needs completions then this makes perfect sense.
> The usability of what?
> why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.
Well, if the entire point of your site is to let people get started, ok, remove all navigation.
But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".
> if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out
And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.
It's funny how UX collectively misses arguably the most important principle - you design for a particular purpose. If the purpose of a site is to sell users some shit, no surprise the site will be dumbed down. Most of the sites are written this way. The sad thing is, patterns developed for those are then applied to things that should be tools. E.g. Google apps redesigns, which lose features and get more annoying to use every iteration.
Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's becoming an unconscious action.
These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation.
I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin text-only "buttons" on a background image. It's a bad idea when Apple does it, too, but if you don't follow Apple's aesthetic your stuff looks "dated". A lot of perfectly fine 2007-2010 vintage sites have been mangled by redesigns following this trend, just so they don't "look old".
If someone develops a browser extension to somehow recognize and remove these things without damaging page flow and functionality, I'll install it. Bonus for forcing those floating site menus that disappear on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up (blocking the thing you were scrolling up to see!) to stay at the top of the page where they belong. I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away rather than being in the header and footer.
In a similar vein I hate that existing user log in are so often buried as a tiny text link under a Sign Up section or a tiny link on the edges of a page.
Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?
As startup and also corporate value is often influenced by the amount of "users" (the smarter investors will look at DAUs and MAUs though), this might even be done on purpose...
Right, hence the sarcasm mark in my post. I think it's a weird tendency for people to care more about their overall user count as some success indicator and focus their UX so much on onboarding new users to seeming disinterested in existing users. Things like "User Satisfaction" and "are my users happy with my product" are a lot harder metrics to get right and I think that's part of why they get discounted by investors/shareholders over raw growth numbers which can have a big, easy "wow" factor in a presentation graph...
>I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away [...]
The thing is that the user being grateful or not isn't what matters, what matters is that they click on those links and thus increase pageviews (doesn't matter if it was intentional or not).
It's especially annoying if you log-in on a SaaS service to find out their redesign makes things worse. Actions that took one click, now take three clicks. As they seperated their single products into different products, removing navigation elements, introducing long animations, don't update their CSS for mobile devices, etc.
I can't think of any that come to mind. I've seen a lot that just do something different... but when I think of 'web 2.0' I think of re-designs that make things 'more beautiful' (pretty) but at the cost of actual functionality. Of course I recognize that many think differently than I do; it's possible that previously they had been given too many choices and thus couldn't understand the system.
As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.
The failure to designate controls as controls instead of static text has driven computer interaction backward decades. So now we're supposed to roll over, click on, or tap every text character on the screen to see if it's a hidden goodie?
The G in GUI stands for GRAPHICAL. If there's no graphic, there's no control indication. Period.
Apple doesn't even remember that you're supposed to GREY THINGS OUT when they're not applicable; you're not supposed to make them disappear entirely. When they're just missing, the user has no idea the function even exists, and does not learn where to find it for future use.
Next article should tell site designers to STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.
To be fair, right where airbnb is cutoff is a massive searchbox for your travel destination. The NYT/news in general, they have navigation but they typically put breaking headlines/articles on the front page with links to othet sections. I assume squares nav goes fixed on scroll.
I know that friction is bad, however, I refuse to assume that my users have an IQ of less than a carrot. I am not exactly asking them to sprint laps by either clicking an icon, or looking in the place they expect a navbar and figure out they can still use the links if I didnt make the rectangle box they sit in white
"I refuse to assume that my users have an IQ of less than a carrot."
Think of it less as an IQ issue and more of a "cognitive energy" issue. Even a smart person would prefer something easier rather than harder because they've got things to do with their limited cognitive energy budget other than merely navigate your website. Plus energy burned that way is energy they're not burning on your actual content, whatever it may be.
It's like accessibility in general; you make your site work well for impaired vision, you've almost certainly improved it for everybody.
Yup, partially comes from there and partially from a lot of the other research on willpower that has been coming out lately. While some of it has proved to be a bit overstated (at least in the press) and there probably isn't literally a such thing as "cognitive energy", I find it a helpful metaphor. Once you realize that you and others have a finite amount of it, you can start thinking clearly about how you spend it and why. The concept in your head doesn't have to be a 100% accurate reflection of reality to produce useful changes.
Funny that this article should appear: I have been complaining about the Campaign Living website for a while: http://www.campaignliving.com/. The Campaign Living product concept is very interesting—furniture that's actually comfortable but that can also be taken apart. But there is no nav bar and few details about the product on their site. It's very annoying. Their desktop browser experience feels broken.
All this is terrible because the product looks so interesting.
Contrast the Campaign Living site with another startup's site: https://vanhawks.com/. This one has a similar big picture on the front page. But there's also a functional nav bar at the top. Product details don't get lost in the big pretty pictures. It's easy to figure out what Vanhawks is selling and what differentiates their product.
Interesting. When I go to campaignliving, I just get two buttons "campain" and "reserve now". The rest is all blank white. I've turned on and off ad-blocking, JS, etc, and it's all the same.
While your description of the product sounds like something I'd want, I'll sadly never be able to investigate it.
Having a plaintext fallback isn't that hard people!
With your intro, I just had to see it. I don't know how interesting their products are, impossible to tell since there's no actual information to find.
Actually it's worse than nothing because it seems to promise something with the teaser arrow, but that goes nowhere. Going for the "Reserve Now" button is unlikely, after all, what am I reserving? Leaves the impression they have nothing to offer.
I really dislike nav bars that take up space on the screen, making it more annoying to read the article or get the info I'm seeking. (Though Firefox "reader" mode can help.) The opposite, no links at all, is certainly worse.
From a front end development, there is actually a simple reason they are going away: Users looking for something will eventually find it anyway. But for people hitting the website for the first time, it is easier to guide them right to the call to action. It's easy for UX people to complain about finding things, but for a lot of sites it is pretty effective at reducing bounce rate.
Meh, I'd see the trend to grey-on-grey, white-on-lightgrey etc. as the bigger problem. Yes, might look Apple-ish, trendy or whatever, but the vast majority of computer users:
a) don't have perfect eyesight
b) work in rooms with inadequate lighthing (e.g. sunlight from behind, making subtle contrasts basically vanish)
c) surf on mobile which most often is equivalent to b), with the addition that the device is shaking relative to the eyes, making the text even harder to read.
I'm just looking at the docs to determine if a project is worth my time investment (especially the learning curve).
No docs? => get off.
Docs unreadable => get off.
Docs outdated/StackOverflow filled with crap that is obsolete since 2 months and the question was asked 1 month ago => get off, work on your backwards compatibility, come back maybe.
Docs readable and reasonably current and the first 10 google hits for a common question don't offer 10 contradicting versions? => <3
The only thing I can really complain about with BerkshireHathaway.com is that the unvisited link colour is purple, which is usually used for visited links.
Affordance has been going out I f style for a while now. Especially with all the hype around flat design. That text, is that a button as well? Or does it change information when touched? How would I know if no one told me? By accident? Okay. Got it.
My prediction is that Affordance will come back in a big way pretty soon.
Whenever I see a fixed navigation bar (e.g. http://fermatslibrary.com/s/a-new-proof-of-euclids-theorem, not like Hacker News' navigation bar), I feel like the page is constricted, and I just want it to go away. Not just visually but "physically," so it still bothers me that bars auto-hide on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up. In fact, that feels even worse to me.
73 comments
[ 1414 ms ] story [ 2629 ms ] threadI installed the new iTunes for my friends dad this weekend when I was helping him with his computer troubles. It took me way too long to find the file menu and it occurred to me in that moment that UI/UX designers have gone too far. In the pursuit of simplicity the marble nose has been chipped off the sculpture.
And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse.
What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog bugs) designers/developers are doing it on purpose. Please stop! Other people have to use your software!
[1] http://www.xkcd.com/1479/
I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match:
When Windows 8 introduced the new file copy/move/delete dialogs, it also introduced a bug. With this monitor arrangement, the dialog would be displayed offscreen: Oops.Just like in the XKCD, the modal dialog locked up the File Explorer window that had opened the dialog. After running into this many times I figured out a workaround using keyboard shortcuts to move the dialog back onscreen.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-f...
Also accessible by right clicking a titlebar, for anybody who's familiar with that one.
Another annoyance with iTunes is that they removed the border. If it's placed over a white background, you can't tell where the iTunes window ends. Minimalism done right can be a beautiful thing. When it's done wrong (it's very difficult to get right), it's a disaster.
Or put longer: hiding functionality with out actually taking away the need to manually interact with the function is a superficial design utility improvement.
The author is making a very broad statement, without supporting data it's nothing more than opinion.
Which it is.
Because there is no data to support the claim.
It's what science is for, in a nutshell. Not trusting ourselves to not make incorrect assumptions without evidence.
that's why I love "Reader View"
This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The focus shifts from full navigability (logging in, become a host, etc) to searching for a listing.
The above statement is everything that is wrong with modern visual styling of software. After everything is said and done, software is a tool which people use to accomplish a goal. I would argue that anything that causes friction with that is Bad Design.
As much as some visual/interaction designers may think that "experience is everything", they ignore that they are insisting on manufacturing and enforcing their opinion of what the users experience should be and forget that the user accomplishing their goal is the only experience that matters.
As an industry we're hurting ourselves by being in this state of cognitive dissonance. The result is that designers try to apply patterns for selling people shit when they're working on tools, even if given tool is the "real deal" and not meant to drive sales by appearance.
Basically, within a given flow (say onboarding or signup), you want to consider having some points of friction interspersed with low friction points. Adding friction in the right places helps to create users who will a)come back and b)will be more active users. The speaker presented some data to back up her assertions.
Getting back to OP's point, the emotional experience is a point of friction that may be worthwhile. Though it may slow down the conversion process or whatever flow the user is supposed to go through, it may result in users who become more attached to the product and ultimately spend more.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2015/2015/events/event_IAP35677
I think trying to evoke a certain emotional response can really only be effective if it's not getting in the way.
I's not absurd at all - it's only absurd if you're in the demo that finds it absurd. And that's quite a small demo compared to most of the population.
You can't sell most people shit unless you create an emotional response.
Hacking psychology - for good or ill - is the basis of all UI and UX. It's a completely different problem to hacking code.
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.
For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases completion rates -- if you look at your homepage as another page that needs completions then this makes perfect sense.
Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.
But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".
And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.
These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation.
I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin text-only "buttons" on a background image. It's a bad idea when Apple does it, too, but if you don't follow Apple's aesthetic your stuff looks "dated". A lot of perfectly fine 2007-2010 vintage sites have been mangled by redesigns following this trend, just so they don't "look old".
If someone develops a browser extension to somehow recognize and remove these things without damaging page flow and functionality, I'll install it. Bonus for forcing those floating site menus that disappear on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up (blocking the thing you were scrolling up to see!) to stay at the top of the page where they belong. I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away rather than being in the header and footer.
I blame Google/Android for all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality.
No joke, my favorite part of the general disdain for hamburger menus is all the ways people describe them.
The thing is that the user being grateful or not isn't what matters, what matters is that they click on those links and thus increase pageviews (doesn't matter if it was intentional or not).
As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.
The failure to designate controls as controls instead of static text has driven computer interaction backward decades. So now we're supposed to roll over, click on, or tap every text character on the screen to see if it's a hidden goodie?
The G in GUI stands for GRAPHICAL. If there's no graphic, there's no control indication. Period.
Apple doesn't even remember that you're supposed to GREY THINGS OUT when they're not applicable; you're not supposed to make them disappear entirely. When they're just missing, the user has no idea the function even exists, and does not learn where to find it for future use.
Next article should tell site designers to STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.
I know that friction is bad, however, I refuse to assume that my users have an IQ of less than a carrot. I am not exactly asking them to sprint laps by either clicking an icon, or looking in the place they expect a navbar and figure out they can still use the links if I didnt make the rectangle box they sit in white
Think of it less as an IQ issue and more of a "cognitive energy" issue. Even a smart person would prefer something easier rather than harder because they've got things to do with their limited cognitive energy budget other than merely navigate your website. Plus energy burned that way is energy they're not burning on your actual content, whatever it may be.
It's like accessibility in general; you make your site work well for impaired vision, you've almost certainly improved it for everybody.
All this is terrible because the product looks so interesting.
Contrast the Campaign Living site with another startup's site: https://vanhawks.com/. This one has a similar big picture on the front page. But there's also a functional nav bar at the top. Product details don't get lost in the big pretty pictures. It's easy to figure out what Vanhawks is selling and what differentiates their product.
While your description of the product sounds like something I'd want, I'll sadly never be able to investigate it.
Having a plaintext fallback isn't that hard people!
Scrolling made the animations run. I didn't see a skip button so I probably get to enjoy those no matter what every time I visit.
Actually it's worse than nothing because it seems to promise something with the teaser arrow, but that goes nowhere. Going for the "Reserve Now" button is unlikely, after all, what am I reserving? Leaves the impression they have nothing to offer.
I really dislike nav bars that take up space on the screen, making it more annoying to read the article or get the info I'm seeking. (Though Firefox "reader" mode can help.) The opposite, no links at all, is certainly worse.
a) don't have perfect eyesight
b) work in rooms with inadequate lighthing (e.g. sunlight from behind, making subtle contrasts basically vanish)
c) surf on mobile which most often is equivalent to b), with the addition that the device is shaking relative to the eyes, making the text even harder to read.
I get that it's their brand colours, but really? Look how much more readable the older docs are: https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.1.0/
No docs? => get off.
Docs unreadable => get off.
Docs outdated/StackOverflow filled with crap that is obsolete since 2 months and the question was asked 1 month ago => get off, work on your backwards compatibility, come back maybe.
Docs readable and reasonably current and the first 10 google hits for a common question don't offer 10 contradicting versions? => <3
My prediction is that Affordance will come back in a big way pretty soon.
I personally don't like the ugly monochrome bar across the top. (Although I do like it when one appears as I scroll down the page, fading in)