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Web 2.0 Distracts from Good Design
stevedcc writes "The BBC is running a story about web 2.0 and usability, including comments from Jakob Nielsen stating "Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design".
From the article:
"He warned that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. Sites peppered with personalization tools were in danger of resembling the 'glossy but useless' sites at the height of the dotcom boom."
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Moderation, and making things optional. Keep content and interactivity alive with Javascript disabled and chances are that whatever you're doing with "Web 2.0" is not ruining your design.
And what most people don't even realise: it's actually the easiest way! Don't write a completely new interface in AJAX, instead just call existing pages with an additional xml=1 parameter. The target page still does whatever you want it to do on the server-side, with the only difference that it sends back the XML (or encoded innerHTML stuff or whatever) instead of an entire page.
This is Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert who regularly gets flamed for advocating more spartan designs and fewer distracting special effects. You're approximately 100% wrong about what he thinks "good design" is.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
There is a certain kind of designer that doesn't care about good design, but does care about anything that's new and "exiting" enough to generate buzzwords. There is another kind of designer that cares about good design and comes to new technology more thoughtfully.
Thus when ANYTHING is new and buzz-wordy, it will be thrown randomly at websites helter-scelter but the first type of designer. Meanwhile, thoughtful designers look for positive and useful ways to incorporate it.
If you go into a room full of people showing proper decorum except for one loud, obnoxious person, it is the loud obnoxious person that will stand out. Thus, at first, the throw-the-buzzword-at-the-screen examples of the new technology/trend will stand out.
Eventually, the buzzword people move onto the next buzzword. At this point, either the thoughtful designers have figured out how to incorperate the technology/trend into good design (in which case it just becomes part of the basic fabric of the web, like CSS)-- or else they haven't, and it goes the way of the BLINK tag and those animated-gif "under construction" things.
The fact that bad designers use the "next new thing" in really bad designs doesn't say anything one way or the other about what value the "next new thing" has to the web as a whole.
Agreed. Don't use Dreamweaver-specific features like templates, and never use the WYSIWYG editor. As an overall environment without all this extra crap, it's top-notch. A pretty decent editor with correct hints for HTML, CSS, and PHP, and proper project management that actually expects you to work on files locally, test on a testing server, and then publish to a production server. It's odd how many other packages can't get this right when it's such a painfully simple concept.
Sorry, what? I do web-dev for a living, and our team currently has two designers using DW for HTML generation. While it's not a beautiful work of art, it's hardly locking you in to using DW only.
The thing locking people into DW is that it's just better than the established competition. We curse at it frequently enough (mostly for its iffy FTP uploads), but it's a mile ahead of anything else I've tried (for what we do with it, at least).