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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

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Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#131

Post by bradly »

ftio wrote: post #119
jszymborski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.

8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you c…

> 8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.

So good it is bug when it 8pt Tahoma looks off: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/10

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#132

Post by dbg31415 »

levmiseri wrote: post #116

Lovely window into the history. Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?

The modern web is sleek and polished, but something’s been lost. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a clean CSS layout for the first time — text aligned perfectly without tables, seamless transitions — it was magic.

But now everything feels uniform. Design is so standardized I can’t remember the last time a site genuinely surprised me or made me want to dig into the code or copy it for my own.

It feels like we’re browsing the Walmart music section… efficient, predictable, and totally sterile. I miss the indie record store vibe — quirky, surprising, maybe even a little messy, but full of personality.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#134

Post by giantrobot »

deltarholamda wrote: post #85
vr46 wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some…

As I recall, Greenspun skewered Siegel. Siegel advocated a two- or three-stage "entry portal" to your site in one version of his "Killer" books, and Greenspun thought that was daft. I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your p…

> Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."

I always find myself thinking "man if only this website would hijack my native browser scrolling...but terribly". Websites that don't hijack scrolling are just too useful and easy to use. Even better is when paragraphs fade-in as I scroll! Oh man I just love seeing shit jump around as I'm trying to read. It's so calming and doesn't induce seasickness at all!

Maybe the people implementing such things never accidentally saw off their fingertips. /s

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#136

Post by rescbr »

jszymborski wrote: post #80
JimDabell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.

Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.

Well, the screen resolutions and pixel densities of that time also made those micro bitmap fonts to be not so micro.

I miss it too.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#137

Post by amatecha »

rkaregaran wrote: post #135

Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff out without tables and spacers.

My personal website from those days landed me a job at one of the biggest web firms in my city at that time. Made my own design in Photoshop, laid out the page with tables and of course the trusty spacer.gif! Good times. Unfortunately the archive.org snapshots of my site aren't loading the images, even though they used to :(

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#138

Post by giantrobot »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #100
oldpersonintx2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that

You have a point. Here's what Alta Vista looked like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.

When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got hit with the web portal bug and the site got more bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#139

Post by munificent »

dfxm12 wrote: post #124
vanschelven wrote: post #10

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. For a lot of websites (as compared to, say, business software or automobiles), the user could be everyone and anyone. They may all have different mental models, expectations, abilities, etc. This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to…

> On the web, the user is rarely a monolith.

Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s.

> what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass.

I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees.

> There is still an art to user centered design,

Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#140

Post by kome »

dasil003 wrote: post #90
vanschelven wrote: post #10

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve.…

“hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined”

this honestly make life so much easier...

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