I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.
I'm surprised he even categorized HN as looking the same. This place is very streamlined compared to other news aggregator type sites, even pre-redesign Reddit.
HN is basically a vBulletin forum from 15 years ago with less functionality. Metafilter and Slashdot are similar and their looks haven't changed much since they started.
The HN Redesign probably happened because the API was easy to use by students and they wanted to experiment with "cyberpunk" style interface, for which a text heavy site like HN was perfeect.
It isn't at all the type of site
I think HK has one of the best (if not the best) design of any news aggregator sites out there. It’s perfect and I hope it doesn’t ever change. I can’t think of many websites that scale so well from a mobile phone to a desktop computer.
Which itself is a perfect showcase for why most sites look the same. That redesign is virtually unusable, and goes so far into being 'art' that it just doesn't work as a discussion forum.
Still, maybe it's more the article writer's concepts of a unique website that don't work more than all sites being the same being a bad thing. Their redesign for Medium.com is nearly as unusable too:
I get the creativity in letting people adjust the length of words/negativity of words/number of most common words in an article, but like the Hacker News redesign, it just creates an unreadable mess.
You can make something different without making it unusable, and most of these redesigns fail miserably at that.
This is very impressive from a technical perspective, but for actual using it, it's truly horrible.
I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.
All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work.
Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around.
This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on).
From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects of them) get blended with the standard.
> All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around.
Yes. This is quite similar to asking why all newspapers look the same.
Attribute improvements are adopted when they make broad sense (including economic). The same with color television, or improvements in book printing quality.
Comprehensive macro changes usually only occur when there is a rather extreme inflection point in technology that makes a true leap possible. Something that was previously impossible not only becomes possible, but makes the experience a lot better for the end user. That's why the iPhone approach murdered the old flip phone industry so rapidly, that technology inflection made a lot of new things possible that were very beneficial / desirable to end users. It justified a large macro change, which users had to adjust to.
I don't think this is true. I think designs get copied from websites which are successful (in all ways, not just design), because people have positive feelings with those designs, and also because using them requires a learning effort. It doesn't mean, however, that the designs themselves are best.
Best was in quotes because it's subjective.
If the people in charge of designing a product perceive a similar product's design to be the best, then they will copy it.
Similarly, if the people paying the people in charge of designing a product perceive a similar product's design to be the best, then they will pay those people to copy it.
There are local path-dependent optima. There may be no -intrinsic reason for favouring these initially, but once established, their familiarity becomes their most valuable aspect.
Chirality, side of the road, alphabet, notational conventions, AC/DC, power frequency, mains socket design, measurement standards, sugar and DNA handedness, etc., etc.
For a casual user, a design that requires extra learning effort to use it is objectively worse than a familiar design.
So for a generic website which cares about first-time visitors (as opposed to a specialized tool that people use often) following established standards and familiar UX paradigms is good usability design.
They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi-directionally.
Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art.
In all cases functionality is most important - which is not incompatible with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too.
But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay.
As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well.
* Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.
> As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well.
I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design fads and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier" than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the most effective or functional for the particular use-case.
I would tend to agree on those points but I also want to believe that websites are an art form. While content strategy and user experience are now in a pre-thought context rather than an after thought, it obviously is about displaying something useful. But it almost stagnates new ideas from coming to the forefront it leads to us all getting swept into the game of 'creating the same layout,' all sites become a boring shell with different words.
Why is everyone comparing websites with physical objects like cars, phones, laptops, and buildings? As soon as you do that, you've broken whatever conclusion you put forward next...
"...and because of the way cement is poured into the foundations of modern office buildings, that's why everyone is using the same website template".
Sorry, but you'll need to try a lot harder with your analogies.
None of these “redesigned web” examples are balanced or readable. While I’m not convinced today’s design is the most optimal, I’d prefer them over any of these futuristic examples
FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely.
A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed.
So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.
You must've thought you were being contrary, but websites already do. They have a top navbar. They have sidebars. They have "edit/delete" dropdowns. They feed you content in a scrollable column.
For a website that's about UX, the actual UX of trying to read each of their articles is actually infuriating. I don't want to scroll. Why isn't the definition next to the name?
I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the same.
Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar. Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations, nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at transferring the content, the story, to your head.
Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A design that distracts from the content is not practical.
Like Hacker News. Most of us are on this website right now via the browser. It's the same interface it's been for years, and that familiarity increases the efficiency of understanding. Re-imaginging everything is a great opportunity for designers to showcase their skills, but wouldn't really improve users' efficiency.
I wonder if this is in a way tangentially connected to McLuhan's notion of 'the media is the message'. That is, what we really, often, seem to be trying to communicate is the form. The form is the primary. Notice how even the most blase and normative and familiar story is rendered anxiety generative when paired with a non-normative form (most David Lynch movies, for example). Whereas, even the most seemingly brutally intrusive content, is eventually normalized by what we might call normative story-telling structures (most so-called transgressive horror films, for example). This, perhaps, is why we react so negatively to form, rather than content, as we instinctively know that form will neutralize any potentially-revolutionary content. And, of course, this spills over into every other area. After all, the major reason sited by those on the analytic side of the philosophy divide most often cite the seemingly apparent obscurantism (form and the obsession with form among the likes of Heidegger and Adorno and Hegel and Kant) of the construction of continental philosophy as its major detractant.
So it's not what you say, it's how it's said. Which would go far in explaining why traditional liberal democratic practitioners always seems ultimately to fail in arguing against nazism, facism, etc. (That is, not only are they fighting with different weapons, but are on different fields on different days.)
So it might be possible to say that it is not design that distracts from the content. It is the design which is the content. The practicality is the reinforcement of an already-established form of cognitive mapping. In this way, it can be viewed as having parity with religion in society (though in some sense subordinate, as it is form, again, that underlies the function of the religious experience), in the sense that perhaps a given society is propagative-force for those forms on a kind of meta level, so, then, to change the forms is to change the society, the potential injection of a type of medical retro-virus (if attempted consciously), if you will, which, of course, as in the case of any external invasion, would likely trigger a sort of immune response.
True, there may be some absorption and incorporation of a rival form, but only rarely, and possibly, in parallel with biology, the more complex the organism, the less likely such would be possible. And, in any regard, absorption and incorporation would either have to be done is such a fashion as that only those aspects that do not create fundamental change are incorporated, which, in effect, means the intrusion is still neutralized, in the way a dominant culture an import cultural artifacts / aspects from another subordinate culture, a biological organism can, etc, or such absorption would give rise to a new form, meaning the effective annihilation of prior contestant forms.
(incorporation of pagan myth could be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Notice how the content can remain the same when encoded into the new Christianized form, and the same content ceases to be of the pagan culture, ceases to propagate the pagan culture.)
It would be interesting to see if form could be separated from content that it wouldn't then be possible to reconstruct, recognize, and/or recreate any given culture.
That's exactly what I mean. They're cool but impractical. In the end, most websites have actual content they want you to access, and overly cool innovative design can get in the way.
A website whose purpose is to convey textual information and to be readable should resemble a book, or more likely, a magazine, because it has a similar function to the printed page.
"Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.
Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from other places.
> "Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.
It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary purpose of many.
For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.
The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog posts.
The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.
Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed page but HTML is a hypertext format, and its purpose (and therefore the purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of hypertext. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles evolved with the printed page.
>Completely different to any book.
Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not completely divorced from the same design considerations.
Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented in the article than this one? Would you rather use any of those redesigns?
It also shouldn't be seizure inducing, retina burning vomit of random colors over a page. A website should be readable with the least amount of mind power given to stuff other than the main content.
Look at the gmail redesign. The modernized it. Used cool new material design and other modern goodies. And yet there is a gmail redesign hate thread on HN every other day.
When I am reading or doing anything, I want to spend my focus and time on the content. Not on the side distractions that serve no purpose.
A website is not a book, but just like novels have found an effective form, so websites have also found an effective form.
I'm sure there will be improvements on that form in the future, but when that happens, most websites will adopt it, and most websites will still look very similar.
The book analogy doesn't work. There is no point mentioning books.
A website is nothing like a book in form, function, purpose, appearance, use, lifespan, the list goes on.
You're confusing the equivalence. A "novel" is a type of book. A "website" is not a type of "something".
A website can be anything the owner wants it to be, with different functions and purpose. It doesn't need to conform to the other "novels" because of some perceived "effective form". That's the point I take from the OP's article.
Websites have not "found their form", that's just the reason you've chosen to believe based on so many websites using the same template.
It was never an analogy. I'm saying that a website should be like a website. Just like a book is like a book. And like books, websites have a purpose that determines their design.
A website can indeed be many different things, but a lot of websites have very similar purposes, so it makes every kind of sense that websites with the same purposes end up looking similar. Just like cars look alike. Or houses.
Of course websites with a different purpose are going to look very different.
A webside definitely shouldn't be a poster. The "nice" redesigns offered in the article "work" as visually interesting posters, but utterly fail as websites - they become unusable, they sacrifice function to improve the visuals. A book-like website may be suboptimal but is usable, but a fancy poster-like website is much worse than that.
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I think that makes the point about why avant-garde style can be difficult to comprehend, no?
Exactly. Making an artistic and unique website is simply too expensive. Think of all the lost revenue. Web design has become a science of analytics crunching, conversion optimization and retention. The author seems to show total ignorance for human pattern recognition.
I think he left SEO as a reason out of this article. We're now building websites as much for humans as for google crawlers to read them, which means meeting standards of accordance in order to even participate in the SEO game. H1, H2, H3 tags, layout, and content headers don't have to look the same or be layed out or structured the same, but many sites have deviated from these formats at their own peril only to return to the warm embrace of conformity. Not to mention that Amp is basically a design standard as much as a content standard.
Because of Bootstrap. Everyone uses it. Every old website that looked different in the past, now does a UI refresh (by just using Bootstrap out of the box with minimal customisation) and becomes another one of those the same looking websites.
Speaking anecdotally, up to around 2016 every other website used Bootstrap or Foundation, often with minimal customization, just because it looks and works well out of the box on all devices. Now it seems like it's getting better, but generic UI components are an extremely relevant aspect.
Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me "it's about the functionality, not the design". https://promethease.com/
Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.
Indeed. The web is more consistent than its ever been, and I think that's a very good thing - it means that I'm not often surprised when I scroll down and the page moves to the right (I'm looking at you, Apple...)
This person takes the time to write an infuriating rant but can’t take the time to understand human pattern recognition, the reason why the web is the way it is.
1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.
If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.
Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do.
Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.
You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts.
Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.
> Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ...
> Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have.
> Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations.
Menu on the bottom is obviously pointless, but sticky menu on the bottom would be so cool, most of the mobile apps moved to tabbar.
Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring).
On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention.
Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
Because on mobile the primary interaction point is your right (or left if you're a leftie) thumb, which naturally falls over a tab bar at the bottom of a screen. Whereas on the Web the primary click zone where your cursor focus is, is at the top of the browser window where the navigation elements are.
There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer).
I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing.
I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.
It's not mass production that causes this though, it's the constraints (the things that make the process "design" instead of "art") that come from how they are used -- and while some of those have solidified into technical or legal constraints, many are simply matters of convention.
Similarly, any user experience study of a website isn't going to find that you should make your menu some diagonal shimmering nonsense, or try to convey information on the side of a spinning cube or any of that sort of thing.
If designer is more interested in fulfilling his artistic/creative ambitions than business value for client (making things great looking, stable and reasonably easy to implement -> in budget), he shouldn't even touch digital today. It's too complex and filled with too many constraints.
But if same designer wants to make decent money, well...
There's a decent amount of research that has found that putting things in non-standard locations impairs most users' ability to accomplish what they want on your website.
The Nielsen Norman Group is a decent place to find some of this research. There's some decent information here about how conventional layouts tend to be more effective:
and the reason all of this matters is that the computer skills of a typical person using your website are probably far, far worse than you think they are:
so if you deviate from the "standard" layout too much, you'll hurt your website's business value because people won't be able to use it effectively.
I think there's still lots of room for creativity within a standard layout. But too much creativity might result in a site that looks better from an aesthetic standpoint but is less effective at actually delivering business value.
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
With tablets like the iPad, the monitor is the keyboard, and your arm does block your view. Maybe it is 'silly' but a whole lot of people buy and use them.
There's been lots of other laptop designs, and they seemed much less silly to me than tablets. Compaq used to put the trackball on the right side of the case (even lefties I know mouse right-handed). HP made a laptop with a little pop-out mouse, which didn't even require a surface to place it on. IBM made a keyboard wider than the case, which unfolded when the lid was opened.
Everyone I know who tried or owned these laptops loved them. Why did they die out?
We were actually talking about something else in the office today that seems similar: Apparently around 2009-2011, several companies were coming out with dual-monitor laptops that folded out when open... Which then died out and disappeared.
Are we talking like Razer's concept from a couple years ago at one of the tech shows (CES? I don't remember, honestly) or something like Acer's Iconia dual screen tablet/notebook?
I had the Thinkpad W700 with the pop out side screen, not to mention the wacom tablet built into the right of the touchpad. It was a great parlor trick, and genuinely useful for running a terminal or a music player to the side of your main workspace.
They demoed it and apparently the unit they demoed was stolen when they were leaving the show.
Not going to lie, I’d love an Acer Iconia style portable at this point. Wouldn’t use it for desktop publishing or probably anything with heavy typing, but just seems like a fun form factor.
It's not a cargo-cult mentality. It's the convergence on a set of best practices "illuminated" by analysis of user-behavior data, as well as the application of basic graphic design principles (like the use of white space to create a visual hierarchy).
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I have to disagree with this. Websites loaded slower because our connection was much slower. You’re comparing network speeds to page load times, which are different.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
What you're describing is not a web site, but an application delivered through the web browser. Sites in the past were smaller and faster because they were just web sites. Today we have a whole host of applications delivered through the browser, with the Internet as the hard drive they're loaded from.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
Gmail in 2018 feels like I'm downloading Thunderbird every time it opens. Ideally I'd only need to load it all once and then it'll be cached for faster load next time. But maybe that's too much to ask when changes must be deployed multiple times a day.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
> Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Could be that web servers don't have much more bandwidth per client. Or that they're actually cold starting VMs or lambda functions instead of running constantly. Still, I agree the overall feel of the web had gotten shower and jankier over time.
Bob Lutz, the car guy (senior positions at BMW, GM, Ford and Chrysler), once commented on this. He noted that his designers liked Bang and Olafson design, with black on black buttons and unusual form factors. This was all wrong for a car interior.
I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.
Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.
Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.
That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how?
All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
I'm not disagreeing that flash was easier but are you sure it isn't just you got jaded? The things you though were cool 20 years ago in Flash just aren't as cool?
The nature of how we browse the web has fundamentally changed since the days when Flash was king. What is the point of investing in a gorgeous website if the audience has moved over to FB/Twitter/Insta and are now acclimatized to scrolling through endless content feeds for a slight hit of dopamine.
By Googling "cool sites", you've stumbled upon the crux of the issue. The site that ranks at the top is the SEO-optimized, but incredibly cookie-cutter, template-heavy Awwwards, which is a back-patting congratulatathon of creative directors at design agencies. So of course the websites featured are their own.
I'm sure at some point they wanted to feature real client websites, but chances are those were mini-sites created for specific campaigns, and were taken offline after the campaign ended.
> I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.
For me the biggest reason was always that it seemed Windows-/Mac-only. Honestly, I don't care if websites use plugins like Flash, Java or whatever. That's what plugin technology was made for. But it's stupid that this is actually forcing people to use only Mainstream OSs.
At least when Flash was really hot, also a reasonably powered computer was needed, so it's also a question of spending.
> That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
> I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.
The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.
We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.
JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
I'm not even talking about the consumption side of Flash. I'm just talking about the tooling for creating Flash content.
Did you ever use Flash? It was incredible. Draw right there on the canvas with basically Illustrator-esque tools (or just File->Open whatever .jpg you want). You can add a keyframe in the timeline, and just drag the image to wherever you want. Then you hit play, it looks right, then you hit publish, and it would play exactly the same in any browser ever.
Also, ActionScript 3 was basically typed javascript, back in like 2004.
I'm with you. I used to be able to crank out a Flash game, with art, in a or two in my spare time, no big deal, not have to look anything up, I knew exactly how the whole system worked (I literally made games completely disconnected from the internet the entire time, my productivity was crazy high), never had to waste a bunch of time fighting frameworks or seeing how things interacted, and could get it to sing (although it had definite limitations. Everything existed in a movieclip object, for example, so when I was asked to port a C++ game that had 900+ objects on the screen at a time it really slowed down).
With Flash, I once ported a game to Flash, from scratch, with art (but no sound...although I could have added sound), in the span of 12 hours, and while it wasn't my most popular game or anything I still get people telling me how much they enjoyed it 15 years later.
In fact, the most popular game I ever designed and released, Proximity, I designed and released in a single week of work (in my spare time).
I have never been able to match the speed and flow of development that I got with Flash since with any game engine since then, and I've tried a whole bunch trying to find something.
The closest thing to it now seems to be Unity but that's a much bigger beast that I don't have a full grasp on and have to look things up or download various things from the asset store. It's possible to make games quickly, but they'll probably play and look like garbage if you don't take your time with them and hire a proper artist, judging by the flood of garbage Unity games released on Steam.
Pico-8 is also fun to program with (it includes a built in sprite editor, level editor, and music editor), but it's a little too limited for my tastes, since I can't really make a commercial product with it, and I'm not that great at doing 2d pixel art. But I still spent some time doing most of a port of Proximity while playing around with it and for people who can do pixel art it's a lot of fun to use.
These same tools exist now for generating similar content sans Flash. Heck, the company behind Flash (well, the acquiring company behind Flash) even makes some of said tools.
Flash did use JavaScript. More precisely, ActionScript, which is the abandoned JavaScript 4 with classes etc. very much like Java. What Flash had was a usable scene graph + synced audio, though, rather than half-arsed attempts to use the DOM/CSS, canvas (immediate mode 2D), undermaintained SVG, or WebGL. I wonder why we were so fast to kill Flash (myself included); maybe it would have been worth to try and open-up Flash. Many, many more designers could author Flash and create valuable content compared to the schizophrenic web stack we have today.
The objective of most websites is not and should not be cool and interesting design, unless it happens to be a site about design.
At the end of the day a site is there to serve a purpose. And, generally speaking, that demands familiarity with the UI and ease of use. If every site demanded increased cognitive load from the user the internet would be a horrible place.
I get that designers want to design cool stuff. Love it. But when all the smoke and bull clears out the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information. Craigslist and good black and white movies prove that good and useful content is what people are after, not award-winning design and cool web tricks.
> the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information
But why? What about a site about art? What about a site about me? What if I don't want you to get "information" about me, but to see the world through my eyes, with the website as my lens? Sure, I guess I could post my non-interactive photos to Instagram, but that seems so... uniform.
Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive. And I'm not saying it's impossible to do in 2018. I'm just saying it was a much more creative-friendly experience 10 years ago, and when we killed Flash, we lost it.
not OP, but I think the fundamental difference is design vs art. Designing for use will drive you to create a site similar to what's out there. Creating art for expression leaves you plenty of room to communicate the aesthetic, mood and so on that you want to share.
> Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive.
This is exactly how I remember the best Flash sites of the 2000s. They weren't creating interactives to drive some lead gen campaign, or sell their blockchain-based SaaS or whatever; it was made purely because it was cool and fun to use. Some portfolio websites for UI and FE developers still have this feel.
> We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.
I get the sarcasm, but IMO, I'd rephrase and say "We did gain Codepen". Lots of cool visual stuff there, but I guess it would be mostly of interest to developers, and not the wider public. Still, I see stuff in Codepen daily that would never make it into a "production environment" because it didn't fit the CMS template, it wasn't responsive, or was using new tech like CSS Grid, or a multitude of the other reasons why websites stopped being cool.
I believe I did cover your scenario when said there was an exception if the site is about design. If showcasing art, design or a specific personality is the objective then usability might have to take secobd fiddle, and that’s fine.
> it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever.
My experience of flash is that it mostly didn't work, and I had to spend an hour after every new OS install trying to get flash to work.
And copy and paste doesn't work, you can't right click to save images, etc. Unless you're trying to make an animation, or a game, flash gives a really lame user experience, I don't know why you like it so much.
There's a lot to be said for Flash. It's a good visual design environment. It certainly beats the horror of CSS/Javascript/WebAssembly/WebGL we have now.
(Giving page designers total control over scrolling was a huge mistake.)
I wasn't really around in its hayday but it had a very low barrier to entry - I remember lots of cartoons being spread years before youtube, you couldn't stream video, but you could wait a minute and then watch a flash animation. You didn't have to be a programmer to make content.
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet.
Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings.
Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity.
> Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns.
> Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever.
Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.
For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.
Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.
But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.
Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.
Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce.
Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
Huh. I always thought non-justified text existed because people are lazy; I absolutely consider fully justified text to be easier to read, not harder. Non-justified text is distracting.
I'm sure it varies from person to person. I believe, though, the bulk of the studies have found that, while people generally find justified text to look nicer, reading speed and comprehension tend to suffer for it.
Same for contrast. If you're not actually trying to read, low-contrast is more appealing. Thus, the CEO who has read their marketing blurb a thousand times likes low-contrast, even though it's counter-productive.
> "I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens)."
Perhaps. But I always presumed the good eyes, good screen, and lack of empathy belonged to the designer. These same site too often seem to have experiences based on an ultra-fast connection, as opposed to a wonky 4G (at best) connection.
You might be right. But I've sat in meetings and/or shared office space with low-UX-IQ designer / frontend types.
I think the low contrast thing is simply a symptom of a general trend twoards form over function, which though it may seem cool, in the end turns out to be cheap. Its the equivalent of putting dark plastic tint on your car windows. It happens in a lot of fields. The truth is most people don't know what they are doing (and we all didn't know what we were doing at one point).
> Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven
That should barely be the case with a good layout and hyphenation algorithm (or a competent printer in the old days). What word processing software does is not necessarily the best possible way to produce an even justified layout.
> Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.
Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.
This led to further simplifications...
... and then Medium looks like Medium.
There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.
Actually wouldn't be terrible if the comments appeared in a more orderly fashion. Right now, they spawn randomly and can even overlap which makes it actually unreadable.
The expanded view with lines between comments and their parents which scroll independently is literally the worst website UI I have ever seen. And I recall some terrible flash abominations.
The medium redesign is also awful. Its inability to handle my portrait-oriented monitor did trigger a sense of childish amusement (truncating POOR to POO) but it's entirely impossible to read anything using it.
They don't care about people with disabilities. They don't even care about people without disabilities. It's not usable for people who are not differently abled.
The pure white screen has a certain aesthetic appeal, but the total lack of content puts it considerably below the original. (I assume this must be an intended effect, given the complete absence of error messages.)
> Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility
That is, create a work of art (as opposed to utility). Okay, art is nice, too.
But mixing artistry and utility is quite hard. Designing a nice, livable house, or a store, is a craft. Building fancy sand castles is a (pastime) art. But mixing the fancy free-form with being actually usable by thousands takes lots of work, resources, and time, because what you'd have to build is a cathedral. (If you think modern technology makes it simple, look at the history of building the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.)
Yet most books have awful spines that prevent the pages lying flat when open. Not because it's useful or logical but because it's cheap and easy for the publisher.
This reminds me of how disappointed I was in my adolescence by how all airports look the same. Only much later I realized that almost any kind of building has a common design and relies on familiarity and expectations in its potential inhabitants.
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places...
That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout.
In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building".
Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.
It's fun to see how <fields> start wild, people explore things as they feel. It's a jungle. Then <field> become a thing, optimization/laziness kicks in, people expect some concepts to be expressed in a certain way so they're predictable. No more jungle.
The answer to this as of the last 5-10 years seems to be to simply be 'responsive design'.
Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design pattern at this point.
> David Carson once said, “don’t confuse communication with legibility.” We should apply this advice to the current state of web design.
Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list.
Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds.
I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.
Carson was saying that as a rejection of minimalism. It was an embrace of experimental graphic design. He was specifically saying that "efficiency and the ability to be understood" were not always the most important factors in a design.
Off topic but these days I load every website in reader view. It’s amazing how annoying custom fonts, sizes and colors become once you get used to reader view for everything. Doesn’t matter what font, font size, color or layout you use - I won’t see it and I love it.
Modern design is just so tiring. A wide range of font sizes from tiny to huge, impossible contrast ratios, font choices that stain the mind, media that distracts from the message - all add up to tiring me out mentally.
Ironically, this is a medium post. Why didn’t the author make their own website to demonstrate how creative they can be?
The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you’re going to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front end is hard, so that’s not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.
If the search area is not on top right, everybody will loose time looking for it. Web is not art anymore. It's mainstream. It might be sad, but well...
Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design. You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them.
Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ? Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ?
Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt.
Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas.
Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.
"Type Primer" was a revealing and relevant read for this topic. Design is about functionality, and good typography and alignment can often-times get you there. Colors, shapes, etc. are interesting for art; but when someone needs to use what you've built, ensuring functionality is clear is crucial.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadSuperimposing the text of one comment over another may look cool, but doing so means you gave no thought to the experience of the user.
Being usable and looking really cool often don't go together very well. I suppose the few cases where they do, are the mark of a truly great designer.
The HN Redesign probably happened because the API was easy to use by students and they wanted to experiment with "cyberpunk" style interface, for which a text heavy site like HN was perfeect. It isn't at all the type of site
Still, maybe it's more the article writer's concepts of a unique website that don't work more than all sites being the same being a bad thing. Their redesign for Medium.com is nearly as unusable too:
https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism
I get the creativity in letting people adjust the length of words/negativity of words/number of most common words in an article, but like the Hacker News redesign, it just creates an unreadable mess.
You can make something different without making it unusable, and most of these redesigns fail miserably at that.
I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.
This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on).
From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects of them) get blended with the standard.
Yes. This is quite similar to asking why all newspapers look the same.
The USA Today was the first to use color in the masthead (and on every daily paper's front page), and that has been copied by some.
Comprehensive macro changes usually only occur when there is a rather extreme inflection point in technology that makes a true leap possible. Something that was previously impossible not only becomes possible, but makes the experience a lot better for the end user. That's why the iPhone approach murdered the old flip phone industry so rapidly, that technology inflection made a lot of new things possible that were very beneficial / desirable to end users. It justified a large macro change, which users had to adjust to.
Similarly, if the people paying the people in charge of designing a product perceive a similar product's design to be the best, then they will pay those people to copy it.
Chirality, side of the road, alphabet, notational conventions, AC/DC, power frequency, mains socket design, measurement standards, sugar and DNA handedness, etc., etc.
So for a generic website which cares about first-time visitors (as opposed to a specialized tool that people use often) following established standards and familiar UX paradigms is good usability design.
They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi-directionally.
Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art.
In all cases functionality is most important - which is not incompatible with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too.
But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay.
As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well.
* Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.
I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design fads and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier" than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the most effective or functional for the particular use-case.
I'm not sure what you think "art" is, but art is communication. That's the whole point. That's all it is.
As the article (mis-)quotes, "Don't mistake legibility for communication."
Writing a text-only webpage isn't somehow opting out of art, any more than a brutalist building is opting out of architecture.
"...and because of the way cement is poured into the foundations of modern office buildings, that's why everyone is using the same website template".
Sorry, but you'll need to try a lot harder with your analogies.
I think publishing this in Medium rather than on one of those designs of their students, kinda proves why most websites prefer to look boring.
https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html
A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed.
So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.
Most of the outrage I remember was around hiding and removing functionality: Chronological newsfeed, page customizations, network pages, etc
Facebook is as vanilla-standard as it gets.
Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar. Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations, nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at transferring the content, the story, to your head.
Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A design that distracts from the content is not practical.
Some people need to be reminded that design is not just being artsy. Design is for accomplishing purpose beyond screenshots to put on one's portfolio.
So it's not what you say, it's how it's said. Which would go far in explaining why traditional liberal democratic practitioners always seems ultimately to fail in arguing against nazism, facism, etc. (That is, not only are they fighting with different weapons, but are on different fields on different days.)
So it might be possible to say that it is not design that distracts from the content. It is the design which is the content. The practicality is the reinforcement of an already-established form of cognitive mapping. In this way, it can be viewed as having parity with religion in society (though in some sense subordinate, as it is form, again, that underlies the function of the religious experience), in the sense that perhaps a given society is propagative-force for those forms on a kind of meta level, so, then, to change the forms is to change the society, the potential injection of a type of medical retro-virus (if attempted consciously), if you will, which, of course, as in the case of any external invasion, would likely trigger a sort of immune response.
True, there may be some absorption and incorporation of a rival form, but only rarely, and possibly, in parallel with biology, the more complex the organism, the less likely such would be possible. And, in any regard, absorption and incorporation would either have to be done is such a fashion as that only those aspects that do not create fundamental change are incorporated, which, in effect, means the intrusion is still neutralized, in the way a dominant culture an import cultural artifacts / aspects from another subordinate culture, a biological organism can, etc, or such absorption would give rise to a new form, meaning the effective annihilation of prior contestant forms.
(incorporation of pagan myth could be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Notice how the content can remain the same when encoded into the new Christianized form, and the same content ceases to be of the pagan culture, ceases to propagate the pagan culture.)
It would be interesting to see if form could be separated from content that it wouldn't then be possible to reconstruct, recognize, and/or recreate any given culture.
I actually went to each of them, they may "look cool" but they were utterly unusable. The hacker news one was horrific.
Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from other places.
Completely different to any book.
It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary purpose of many.
For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.
The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog posts.
The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.
Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed page but HTML is a hypertext format, and its purpose (and therefore the purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of hypertext. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles evolved with the printed page.
>Completely different to any book.
Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not completely divorced from the same design considerations.
Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented in the article than this one? Would you rather use any of those redesigns?
Which is the exact opposite of what this article tries to recommend.
Look at the gmail redesign. The modernized it. Used cool new material design and other modern goodies. And yet there is a gmail redesign hate thread on HN every other day.
When I am reading or doing anything, I want to spend my focus and time on the content. Not on the side distractions that serve no purpose.
I'm sure there will be improvements on that form in the future, but when that happens, most websites will adopt it, and most websites will still look very similar.
A website is nothing like a book in form, function, purpose, appearance, use, lifespan, the list goes on.
You're confusing the equivalence. A "novel" is a type of book. A "website" is not a type of "something".
A website can be anything the owner wants it to be, with different functions and purpose. It doesn't need to conform to the other "novels" because of some perceived "effective form". That's the point I take from the OP's article.
Websites have not "found their form", that's just the reason you've chosen to believe based on so many websites using the same template.
A website can indeed be many different things, but a lot of websites have very similar purposes, so it makes every kind of sense that websites with the same purposes end up looking similar. Just like cars look alike. Or houses.
Of course websites with a different purpose are going to look very different.
(read the columns up-and-down …)
Now: masonry layout / infinite scrolling
Designs for websites were made in photoshop by creatives. Now designs for websites are made by front end engineers, or UX consultants.
Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me "it's about the functionality, not the design". https://promethease.com/
Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.
The other 5% is a self-expressive art project.
Part of me wonders if the author is trolling everyone by writing an article about the need for more unique design on Medium.com.
1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.
If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.
Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do.
Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.
Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.
You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ...
> Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
GDPR cookie settings? Imprint? Privacy statements?
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have.
> Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations.
Sorry ;-)
Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring).
On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention.
Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer).
I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing.
I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.
Similarly, any user experience study of a website isn't going to find that you should make your menu some diagonal shimmering nonsense, or try to convey information on the side of a spinning cube or any of that sort of thing.
Design != Art !!!
If designer is more interested in fulfilling his artistic/creative ambitions than business value for client (making things great looking, stable and reasonably easy to implement -> in budget), he shouldn't even touch digital today. It's too complex and filled with too many constraints.
But if same designer wants to make decent money, well...
There's a decent amount of research that has found that putting things in non-standard locations impairs most users' ability to accomplish what they want on your website.
The Nielsen Norman Group is a decent place to find some of this research. There's some decent information here about how conventional layouts tend to be more effective:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-...
and how placing logos in the center instead of on the left often prevents users from accomplishing their goals:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/centered-logos/
and the reason all of this matters is that the computer skills of a typical person using your website are probably far, far worse than you think they are:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
so if you deviate from the "standard" layout too much, you'll hurt your website's business value because people won't be able to use it effectively.
I think there's still lots of room for creativity within a standard layout. But too much creativity might result in a site that looks better from an aesthetic standpoint but is less effective at actually delivering business value.
With tablets like the iPad, the monitor is the keyboard, and your arm does block your view. Maybe it is 'silly' but a whole lot of people buy and use them.
There's been lots of other laptop designs, and they seemed much less silly to me than tablets. Compaq used to put the trackball on the right side of the case (even lefties I know mouse right-handed). HP made a laptop with a little pop-out mouse, which didn't even require a surface to place it on. IBM made a keyboard wider than the case, which unfolded when the lid was opened.
Everyone I know who tried or owned these laptops loved them. Why did they die out?
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/lenovo-w700ds-laptop-rev...
They demoed it and apparently the unit they demoed was stolen when they were leaving the show.
Not going to lie, I’d love an Acer Iconia style portable at this point. Wouldn’t use it for desktop publishing or probably anything with heavy typing, but just seems like a fun form factor.
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
A while ago most people didn't realise to what extend loading times affect engagement.
If they knew, flash would be dead much quicker.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
Yes they could be faster, but most are still useful at a 5 second load time.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.
Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.
That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.
All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
I googled "cool websites" and these came up
https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design...
don't know if any of those do anything for you. I'm too lazy to look for more but I feel like they are out there.
By Googling "cool sites", you've stumbled upon the crux of the issue. The site that ranks at the top is the SEO-optimized, but incredibly cookie-cutter, template-heavy Awwwards, which is a back-patting congratulatathon of creative directors at design agencies. So of course the websites featured are their own.
I'm sure at some point they wanted to feature real client websites, but chances are those were mini-sites created for specific campaigns, and were taken offline after the campaign ended.
For me the biggest reason was always that it seemed Windows-/Mac-only. Honestly, I don't care if websites use plugins like Flash, Java or whatever. That's what plugin technology was made for. But it's stupid that this is actually forcing people to use only Mainstream OSs.
At least when Flash was really hot, also a reasonably powered computer was needed, so it's also a question of spending.
> That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
Is it though? Have you ever explored/tried some of the modern web authoring tools? I must admit I haven't tried any of these: https://www.templatemonster.com/blog/html5-animation-tools/
The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.
We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.
JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
Did you ever use Flash? It was incredible. Draw right there on the canvas with basically Illustrator-esque tools (or just File->Open whatever .jpg you want). You can add a keyframe in the timeline, and just drag the image to wherever you want. Then you hit play, it looks right, then you hit publish, and it would play exactly the same in any browser ever.
Also, ActionScript 3 was basically typed javascript, back in like 2004.
With Flash, I once ported a game to Flash, from scratch, with art (but no sound...although I could have added sound), in the span of 12 hours, and while it wasn't my most popular game or anything I still get people telling me how much they enjoyed it 15 years later.
In fact, the most popular game I ever designed and released, Proximity, I designed and released in a single week of work (in my spare time).
I have never been able to match the speed and flow of development that I got with Flash since with any game engine since then, and I've tried a whole bunch trying to find something.
The closest thing to it now seems to be Unity but that's a much bigger beast that I don't have a full grasp on and have to look things up or download various things from the asset store. It's possible to make games quickly, but they'll probably play and look like garbage if you don't take your time with them and hire a proper artist, judging by the flood of garbage Unity games released on Steam.
Pico-8 is also fun to program with (it includes a built in sprite editor, level editor, and music editor), but it's a little too limited for my tastes, since I can't really make a commercial product with it, and I'm not that great at doing 2d pixel art. But I still spent some time doing most of a port of Proximity while playing around with it and for people who can do pixel art it's a lot of fun to use.
* 12 hour game, Squarez: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/91933 * Proximity: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428
At the end of the day a site is there to serve a purpose. And, generally speaking, that demands familiarity with the UI and ease of use. If every site demanded increased cognitive load from the user the internet would be a horrible place.
I get that designers want to design cool stuff. Love it. But when all the smoke and bull clears out the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information. Craigslist and good black and white movies prove that good and useful content is what people are after, not award-winning design and cool web tricks.
But why? What about a site about art? What about a site about me? What if I don't want you to get "information" about me, but to see the world through my eyes, with the website as my lens? Sure, I guess I could post my non-interactive photos to Instagram, but that seems so... uniform.
Not every website has to make money. They can entertain just by the virtue of being interactive. And I'm not saying it's impossible to do in 2018. I'm just saying it was a much more creative-friendly experience 10 years ago, and when we killed Flash, we lost it.
We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.
This is exactly how I remember the best Flash sites of the 2000s. They weren't creating interactives to drive some lead gen campaign, or sell their blockchain-based SaaS or whatever; it was made purely because it was cool and fun to use. Some portfolio websites for UI and FE developers still have this feel.
> We did gain apps though. So I guess there's that.
I get the sarcasm, but IMO, I'd rephrase and say "We did gain Codepen". Lots of cool visual stuff there, but I guess it would be mostly of interest to developers, and not the wider public. Still, I see stuff in Codepen daily that would never make it into a "production environment" because it didn't fit the CMS template, it wasn't responsive, or was using new tech like CSS Grid, or a multitude of the other reasons why websites stopped being cool.
My experience of flash is that it mostly didn't work, and I had to spend an hour after every new OS install trying to get flash to work.
And copy and paste doesn't work, you can't right click to save images, etc. Unless you're trying to make an animation, or a game, flash gives a really lame user experience, I don't know why you like it so much.
(Giving page designers total control over scrolling was a huge mistake.)
EH?
You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet.
Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings.
Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity.
> Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns.
> Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever.
Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.
For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.
Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.
But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.
Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.
Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
Fortunately extensions like Stylus allow to tweak page styles to make them more usable.
Perhaps. But I always presumed the good eyes, good screen, and lack of empathy belonged to the designer. These same site too often seem to have experiences based on an ultra-fast connection, as opposed to a wonky 4G (at best) connection.
You might be right. But I've sat in meetings and/or shared office space with low-UX-IQ designer / frontend types.
That should barely be the case with a good layout and hyphenation algorithm (or a competent printer in the old days). What word processing software does is not necessarily the best possible way to produce an even justified layout.
True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.
Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.
This led to further simplifications...
... and then Medium looks like Medium.
There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.
I think you can even go back as far as 1000 years to find those same standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule
What happens, when, in the words of the article, you "Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility"?
The answer, it appears, is their re-design of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ which I find unusable.
The expanded view with lines between comments and their parents which scroll independently is literally the worst website UI I have ever seen. And I recall some terrible flash abominations.
That is, create a work of art (as opposed to utility). Okay, art is nice, too.
But mixing artistry and utility is quite hard. Designing a nice, livable house, or a store, is a craft. Building fancy sand castles is a (pastime) art. But mixing the fancy free-form with being actually usable by thousands takes lots of work, resources, and time, because what you'd have to build is a cathedral. (If you think modern technology makes it simple, look at the history of building the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.)
That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout.
In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building".
Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.
Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design pattern at this point.
Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list.
Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds.
I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.
I really couldn't care less about modern web design -- Just show me the text.
The web had ~ 5 system fonts before Web Fonts were available in 2008 / 2009.
Now the web has many thousands of the best fonts ever created by the world's best foundries.
The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you’re going to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front end is hard, so that’s not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.
Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design. You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them.
Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ? Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ?
Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt.
Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas.
Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.
What do customers need that modern web frameworks don't provide, and why is it wrong for customers to want the web to be familiar and unobtrusive?