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Web designs are getting too complicated

websmith.studio

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Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#11

Post by chrismorgan »

Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.

Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.

I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.

Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#12

Post by jameslk »

Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].

Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].

0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...

1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics

2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript

3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#13

Post by palmfacehn »

andsoitis wrote: post #2

”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”

I'm starting to think that lightweight framework for web apps might be a wasm-dos-win3.11 or wasm-wince target.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#14

Post by neepi »

So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.

I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.

As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.

Perhaps it's the people?

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#15

Post by neya »

I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.

Just a sad state of affairs overall.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#16

Post by lelanthran »

jameslk wrote: post #12

Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s…

> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].

I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".

The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.

Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.

If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:

1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use

and

2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#17

Post by k310 »

pmontra wrote: post #5
k310 wrote: post #3

Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.

Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.

Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#18

Post by tokioyoyo »

neya wrote: post #15

I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simp…

Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#19

Post by jameslk »

lelanthran wrote: post #16
jameslk wrote: post #12

Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s…

> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated". The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous. Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables. If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3…

Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats:

> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.

In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).

The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#20

Post by shoeb00m »

neepi wrote: post #14

So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email. I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it tur…

Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores

I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.

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