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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."
I stick to html, since everyone can read it (mostly). And I hand code it, since most of the editors seem to make a real mess of the code, and sometimes I want to change it. Anyone else this old fashioned ?
Seriously, just because you can doesn't mean you should.
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You mean I could no longer get a job with my pimped geocities/xoom/fortunecity skills?
Infiltrated dot Net
Actually, I thought our current one *looked* better too.
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Of all of the best practices that I've learned as a designer analyst over time, I've come to realize that management (with a bug in their collective bonnets about some new-fangled technology), do a better job of screwing up design and usability than the technology itself.
Adding simple fortune-cookie CGI scripts, html tables with round corners, and javascript mouse-hover-active colors doesn't really make a site more useful. Sure, they can add to the mood if everything else is already well thought-out, but they can't save a bad site. That's Web 1.0 gloss.
With the newer sites, there's just as much crap that adds practically nothing. Expandable submenus in sidebars with cute > marks, dynamic community tagging options, dynamic community inbox viewing and sorting, and the ever-present use of rich gradient shading in every header tag. That's Web 2.0 gloss.
Hrm... I seem to have described an awful lot of Slashdot features. Curious.
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I'll grant at any time that usability is the number one priority. But this kind of "backlash" *against* Web 2.0 technologies is misguided, and a kind of hype in itself. Technologies are tools--they can be used to good or bad effect, and you can't generalize about the tool by the sites that happen to use it.
How can Nielsen miss the HUGE advancements in usability that these technologies have granted us? Sites that are designed as applications -- say, gMail -- no longer (as of years ago) have to be restrained by a protocol that was NEVER intended to be used like an application! I swear, I'll never understand why people get all up in arms about technologies that make the web EASIER to use!
This appears to me to be the same kind of argument as "Style vs. Substance! Style is bad, mkay?" Yet in this case it's not even about style, but about tools that enable a far bigger range of usability than previously. What gives?
Limina.Log
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The makers seem either unaware of or uninterested in users who aren't already knee-deep in their competitors.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Sure, blame Web 2.0 for your horribly designed web pages.
The man in the article himself states clearly Web 2.0 is simply the "latest fad". It's simply the most recent in a long stream of red herrings chased by ignorant companies in an attempt to be web savvy.
The root of the problem is that the people who understand web design and make webpages are beholden unto managers, bosses, and other autorities who haven't the faintest idea what a good webpage does or looks like. The web designers bring prototypes, designs and nifty things to these people and get asked stupid questions such as "Is it Web 2.0". They want everything the internet has to offer in their webpage, whether or not it makes any sense for it to be there.
Web 2.0 is another potentially awesome facet of the internet being turned into a collective migraine for web designers.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Sounds like Web 2.0 is just like Flash.
Everyone gets such a hardon trying to come up with new crazy new ways of doing things that have been done the same way since the dawn of the interwebs. They forget that they've been done that way for a reason... they work. People know what to expect. And they find themselves at ease and in a comfortable state when surfing within those parameters.
That's not to say there should be no innovation, but that innovation should make things easier to understand and use, not scare your customers away.
After all, web 2.0 helps me to design rich-client synergies, disintermediate semantic networking and, of course, let's not forget it can assist in syndicating standards-compliant widgets*. Try doing all that on your web 1.0, gramps!
Oh and whilst I know that mangling the English language has become an artform here on Slashdot, surely "Web 2.0 distracts good design" is bad even by our (admittedly low) standards.
* Courtesy of The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.
I've seen two definitions of Web2.0: user-contributed contents, and the use of AJAX/DHTML.
The first characteristic doesn't need any new technology: Slashdot is a good example of a web site containing lots of user-contributed contents, and works for ages. No need for a 2.0 version of the web.
The second one is newer: we already had DHTML, but didn't have XMLHttpRequest. This is where abuse can lead to bad design and bad usability, IMO.
My advices to web developers: just because the content of your web site is dynamic and the site contains some forms doesn't mean you have a web application like GMail! Most of the time, it's just a web site, and should work like a traditional web site: the back button should work, opening pages in new windows or new tabs should work.
Just because you may refresh the body of the page without reloading it entirely doesn't mean you should. Think about why frames are usually avoided when you plan using AJAX: it might cause the same annoyances.
I use a bunch of Firefox plugins to improve my browsing experience... but I recently was stuck using a computer with only IE. I had totally forgotten how many sites were obnoxious. I don't mind some reasonable advertising, but sites seem to be increasing the percent of the screen given to annoying animated/Flash ads, huge colourful ads in the middle of the article, etc.
The worst are the sites that underline every noun and if your mouse accidentally passes over one of those words, a big ad box pops up that you have to close. How did it ever occur to someone to make a site where you aren't even free to move your mouse around if you want to without your reading being interrupted?
It also seems like the big, rich companies are the worst offenders. Like they can afford to piss off visitors, and we'll just take it... 'cause you know MSN is such a great site. Yuk. Usability has been going downhill since forever.... blaming web 2.0 is barking up the wrong tree. Maybe try blaming the boom of web advertising.
I'm serious--are you joking? There is almost NO hierarchy. All the data, and there's a lot of it, is basically on one or two visual layers. It's impossible to get an instant snapshot of the available content sections because the section headers scroll off ("below the fold"), and there's no top level navigation. Section headings are the same size as the body type, so I can't easily discern where sections begin and end (he could have just used separate divs for each section, so there'd be a gutter between colored backgrounds).
You and Nielsen seem to promote this idea that having no sense for design (information OR graphic) somehow actually *increases* usability. I'm all for usability first, fast downloads, etc., but we have to stop and admit that design IS important.
Limina.Log
Yeah...
Just like our parents' generation grew up to watch less television.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Er, at the risk of sounding flamebaity, that's really nothing new—since when was Microsoft ever able to design anything usable?
Nielsen is a sellout and has no credibility. Shortly after releasing his "Flash is 99% bad" work, Nielsen took money from Macromedia, and suddenly it's not so bad:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
Usability includes being able to access the content without using proprietary software, Jakob!
What I don't understand is why the BBC is posting this now. Did Neilsen just speak somewhere?
It's the same story he's been telling all along - so what makes it news? Why now?
This confirms something I've always thought true, especially when I first saw CSS come out (although mostly with CSS 2.0, the much more troublesome incarnation). New technologies, whether it be AJAX (which is becoming known for being insecure), CSS, or even HTML when it first came out, do not equal instant good design. Even now, users of HTML, arguably one of the oldest markup languages on the internet (or the oldest most used markup), still utilize what have become poor features, notably the marquee tag (interestingly implemented by Internet Explorer), and some consider tables a remanent (although arguably still useful tag) since CSS came along. Web design has always been, IMO, about compromises: compromise for what you want to do for what you can do, for what you want and what works, for what's ambitious to what's practical. Just because you have that bomb, doesn't mean you have to blow something up. This why only recently have i considered learning more beyond HTML and CSS (the later which I'm still learning to get a fluent grasp on without consulting tutorials every 5 mins). Again, IMO, I would point out that PHP is probably the only technology of Web 2.0 that has proved more useful than troublesome, which is why I plan on learning it whenever I stop stalling and actually take an intro to programming course I regretfully choose not to take in high school in favor of "learning" Word for an entire semester >_>. It's not all hopeless though; part of the fallout of this whole Web 2.0 business is that the new technologies will eventually be learned enough to utilize more specifically instead of riding a popularity wave. It's all really silly when most changes happen gradually; it's just the same game as whatever Web 1.0 was with different cards and different players.
Wow. I completely agree. I do admit that his site is useability is more important then design, but this is just horrible. You need to focus at least a little bit on design. Looks like he needs to update some of his content too. http://www.useit.com/about/nographics.html "and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps" Really???
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.
I think the problem with Nielsen's argument is that what he considers the "basics" have changed over the last 10 years. As an anal graphic designer AND a huge MySpace fan, all this complaining about usability (or lack of) is just "old design" snobbery. Eventually people have to wake up and realize that just because it's ugly doesn't mean it's diffucult or 'not fun' to use.
Bottom line is that MySpace, to my knowledge, is the ONLY "web 2.0" site that allows (hacky) CSS and HTML to be manipulated by users at all levels. People who, 3 years ago, could barely turn a computer on are now blogging, posting pictures, e-mailing (albeit through the MySpace messaging service), and learning to write hypertext tags, specifically because of MySpace.
IMHO, in the "new" consumer-based web, the functionality IS the design, and it is NOT useless.
Google Groups (usenet) is an example of misuse of Web 2.0. Before that it had a pretty good HTML-based approach. Then they Ajaxified it, and it is clunky and jittery. It is hard to know whether a mouse-stroke "took" or not, and sometimes it resizes wrong. It just feels "unnatural".
Lesson: Use Ajax *only* when "traditional" HTML is not a reasonable match. Don't reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. There are good uses for Ajax-like stuff, but this was just not one of them. Somebody at Google is fad chasing.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm against entirely Flash-made sites. Not even Macromedia has a full site made in Flash, they use it only for the menu and landing-page banners. They don't put content you need to read in there.
And they didn't yet come up with a simple solution for what IMHO are their main 4 problems:
1 - One URL, One page. In order to direct a friend to a specific product in a flash site you have to tell him things like: Go to this URL, then click products, then click the shoes number X. OK, this may be a development problem but they could make it very easy.
2 - Open links in new tabs/windows. This one is really annoying.
3 - Content indexing. It is currently possible, but yet more attention is drawn to a normal HTML page than to a flash site.
4 - Ability to copy/paste the text you are reading. This one is really a development problem but again, it can be made simpler.
It used to be that an art director would build the design for websites, but with dynamic and active websites (Web2.0 if, we need to use that word), a web architect is the new boss needed to run the show. That is, someone who understands template-based programming and information workflow enough to develop a solid basis for the designers to take over and make things look pretty. Oh yeah, and this person should also be able to direct the programmers to organize things in a useful manner for the designers as well. Until companies catch on and begin hiring website directors with these qualifications, they'll just continue to roll out that static, oh so pretty and dumb sites that they always have been.
Using Microsoft Frontpage makes what you say nigh IMPOSSIBLE.
Back on topic:
When Ye Olde Macromedia bought up Allaire Homesite, they gobbled and buried what was the best by-hand HTML editor on the market. Back in the Dreamweaver 3 & 4 days, all that Javascript hoojimawaja was best left as an "Action". I didn't want to know what it did... Just if it looked nice when I resized my NN4 window.
It's all well and good to say "I code by hand", you probably also "charge by the hour", why then do you not also "carve on clay tablets"? This notion of "good old days" purity and perfection is just a waste of time. HTMLTidy exists, use it. Text editors with colour coding and brace matching exist, use them. (Using a Mac? Go buy CSSEdit! NOW GORRAMIT!!!) You think an iGoogle page that's 99% Javascript was hacked together by some purple-haired kid wearing roller skates, over the lunch hour? IDE's exist, use them.
Humans use tools. I don't need Eclipse, and I have long been of the growing opinion that NVU is not a viable option for professionals. Dreamweaver is a perfectly viable multipurpose tool that will never get it all right, and offers about three times more cruft than I need, but has enough time-saving features to make it worth the fraction of a suite bundle that I need to buy anyway... I have CS3 to play with now. Joy! I think Adobe will take DW to better places than GoLive, and they drastically improved Flash right out of the gate.
Dreamweaver templates have always been a terrible solution. Contribute ain't much better, but in some cases it's the only way to maintain strict control over users posting content without resorting to a CMS, and all the security troubles a CMS brings. I like that all these tools exist, even if I think they're (for the) stupid. What bothers me is the constant monopoly merging, reducing the choice. R.I.P. Homesite.
Cheers
Have gnu, will travel.