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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

#151

Post by larodi »

brailsafe wrote: post #11
larodi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for prin…

There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try to do anything and everything with it before it was formally capable of doing it in a standardized way. > Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr app…

I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I say standards were okay from day one. but actually some were.

Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps.

Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements.

Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost.

Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web.

ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.

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

#152

Post by rglover »

I badly miss this era. It was so happy, positive, and innocent. People were really just having fun making stuff and teaching each other. Nowadays it all feels very fake and vanity-driven.

Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.

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

#154

Post by rglover »

tunnuz wrote: post #95

Zeldman was one of my heroes in the 00s. I would argue that the list could also include Eric Meyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer ).

Still use Eric's CSS Reset 2.0 till this day. Have never found anything quite as simple and to the point.

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

#155

Post by KaiserPro »

Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech)

The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions.

What it got right:

Design once, looks the same anywhere

reasonably powerful scripting language

Vectors as a first party drawing primitive

abstracted OS hooks

This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life.

There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom.

The closest thing to it now is unity.

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

#157

Post by jt2190 »

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.…

> He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.

I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.

I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.

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

#158

Post by QuantumGood »

jt2190 wrote: post #157
dasil003 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules. I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on…

In creating documents with hyperlinks for training students, I have found blue underlined still catches the most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting, different colors of underlining.

I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.

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

#159

Post by mikeryan »

rescbr wrote: post #136
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.

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.

Serious lack of anti aliasing contributed too.

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

#160

Post by mikeryan »

kristianc wrote: post #29
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.

Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.

I think most practical designers saw the value of what Nielsen was showing but hated how he completely eschewed aesthetics. Fortunately the advent of CSS and the need for responsive mobile design forced everyone to learn how to integrate functionality with aesthetics.
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