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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

#171

Post by jszymborski »

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…

> IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.

Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.

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

#172

Post by rchaud »

eadmund wrote: post #105
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.…

Honestly, I believe that the Web would have been better had we stuck to those expectations more diligently and evolved more slowly and thoughtfully. That one can does not imply that one should. Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!

Blue and purple links wouldn't be visible on any website that chose to use those as background colors (or any range of background colors where the contrast would have been too low to be visible).

The web at the time was an "anything goes" multimedia format, not a dry digital paperback or textbook where all the content had to fit within the publisher's specifications to limit printing, weight and distribution costs.

Nowadays, most browsers have a "reading mode" that can flatten the content into something that satisfies those Nielsen conditions though.

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

#173

Post by rchaud »

JimDabell wrote: post #24
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.

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.

Most splash screens had a "skip" button though. If you were visiting the website frequently, you as the user could always bookmark the internal page that the intro screen pointed to.

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

#174

Post by rchaud »

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.

In the long run, Flash was a blip on the web. 2004-2010 tops.

NNGroup "best practices" have been obsolete for at least 15 years, because the purpose of a website is no longer about displaying free information. Websites have become a fully commercial enterprise focused on conversion, so every trick in the book is used:

- Infinite scroll and autoplaying video on social media and blogspam sites

- Layouts shifting after content load because of the Javascript ad delay

- "Other Articles you might like" blocks in the middle of an article

- "Subscribe to our email newsletter" popups/modals everywhere

- "You are reading 1 of x free articles" dickbars

and that's just scratching the surface.

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

#175

Post by tchock23 »

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…

I used to run a usability testing service way back in the day and had the same feelings about Nielsen - way too rigid and pedantic for my tastes and the reality of the tests I was running every day.

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

#176

Post by rchaud »

dbg31415 wrote: post #132
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’…

Sleek and polished? Where? Not Amazon.com, not any newspaper/periodical site loading a bunch of ads shifting the layout, not Substack or Medium.com with its exhortations to log in or become a member.

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

#177

Post by rchaud »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #15
oldpersonintx2 wrote: post #9

don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars

I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.

I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.

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

#178

Post by rchaud »

oblio wrote: post #76
plun9 wrote: post #33

Now David Siegel has changed his opinion on climate change. He created a website with independent climate research: https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net

LOL It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will. However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.

funny that you would cite a Wayne Gretzky quote, considering where his politics are these days.

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

#179

Post by karaterobot »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13
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 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.

I don’t think designers hated Nielsen. I was doing web design at the time, and the general sentiment seemed to be: “Sure, he’s probably right—but the client wants it done their way instead, so…”

Still, his bite-sized advice stuck around and continues to shape the conversation. That’s where everyone learned about Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, optimal text column widths, the value of usability testing with just a few users, and the deep shame you should feel for making text hard to read. He may not have invented those ideas, but his articles popularized them. And because he was one of the few doing serious usability research and publishing it online, his authoritative voice gave those ideas real weight that designers could leverage to make the case to their bosses and clients.

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

#180

Post by rodgerd »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13
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 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.

> Designers hated Nielsen.

Several of the designers I worked with liked him, in as much as he gave them research to back them in their arguments with clients that the site should actually be usable.

It is still one of the high points of my career that I was part of a team that shipped an internet banking application that worked well in the then-current major browsers of IE 6 and Navigator 4, but also worked in Lynx and on a Palm Pilot browser.

We've now degenerated to the point that "engineers" demand Chrome everywhere.

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