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Ask HN: What's with the giant & clunky web designs?

7 points by yarone ↗ HN
Today Freshbooks began testing, with its paying customers, an "updated" look: http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2011/12/14/new-redesigned-header-emails-and-login-screen/

The feedback has been mostly negative (189 comments as of now).

The most visible difference is the new header area (logo, primary nav, secondary nav), which, among other changes, has been stretched vertically, occupying more pixels and pushing down the important stuff (you know, the actual content).

I've seen this over and over again with recent web designs: enormous fonts, images, excessive white space, etc.

My theory is that the folks designing this stuff have massive hi-res Apple Cinema displays, which make the designs look reasonable to them (I've seen this firsthand a few times).

Any ideas what's going on here?

Is there a practical basis for these (what I perceive as giant and clunky) designs?

7 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] thread
jsundquist
Yep. Totally agree with you. The same is with the new Gmail. Looks great on my Apple Cinema display...way too huge on most other computers. It has got to be that these designers are using huge displays with resolutions to match.

Same thing happens to programmers...work on a very fast machine, and never realize how slow something is on an average users computer.

wladimir
I agree. The new gmail looks great on high-resolution, large screens. But on my laptop, it's terrible by default too much empty space; luckily they allow configuring the spacing.
Wilduck
Gmail has become nearly unusable on my 11" Macbook air. I wouldn't mind it so much if you could A) minimize the top bar or B) have it not scroll with the page. However, as far as I can tell, these aren't options.
caw
I wonder if it has anything to do with touch interfaces? People need big giant buttons so they can punch them without a mouse. I don't know if Freshbooks really had this in mind, but it could be the basis of the "trend" that sites are redesigning for. Then you get the "me too" site redesigns that don't know what they're redesiging for.
da_n
What I have found as a designer/developer is that usability trumps design, and users I have worked with prefer having large, readable text and buttons as well as plenty of white space. 90% of what a web design should be is about the content, not the decoration. Yeah, it might look cool having 10 point text everywhere on menus etc in a highly compressed layout using every available pixel etc, except when you get to be over a certain age and need a magnifying glass to see it (I have great eyesight and prefer big text). I now often use 17pt text just for the body text alone and have scaled up other elements to suit. I do not think this is a negative trend.
unhillbilly
All of the above, and the enormous boomer demographic is hitting the age where eyesight is fading.