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How the Web Became Unreadable

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Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#181

Post by knieveltech »

zeveb wrote: post #114
ThomPete wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure just like you don't need insane convoluted frameworks with a billion dependencies to develop 99% of the web-apps out there yet thats what most developers end up with. This is about self-expression and it's a small price to pay (and easily fixable by just forcing your own style sheet) for getting a vibrant and diverse jungle of content and ways to express it. The rest we can deal with.

> This is about self-expression and it's a small price to pay Is that a small price to pay for worsening the experience of anyone older than maybe 26? I can't even imagine trying to walk my elderly neighbour through installing her own stylesheet, nor trying to explain why none of her sites look right now, even if they are more legible.

Check your ageism bub. Some of us have been online longer than you've been alive.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#182

Post by Animats »

Greg Lutz of GM once commented that GM's designers had fallen in love with Bang and Olufsen design from the 1980s.[1] Bang and Olufsen was (and still is) big on black-on-black design, with controls so subtle that they're barely visible. This makes for great photos, but not usable cars. He, as head of GM, had to restrain them from making inscrutable dashboards. This mindset seems to have reached the Web.

For an alternative design paradigm, see Olivetti industrial design of the 1960s and 1970s.[2] Bright colors, strong contrast, and materials nice to touch. Any good museum of modern art will have some Olivetti devices of that period. Those are worth a look. They had contrast without clutter.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Bang+and+Olufsen&tbm=isch [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=olivetti+industrial+design&t...

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#183

Post by duncan_bayne »

jonstokes wrote: post #55

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…

> At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy.

That statement literally made me slightly irritated.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#184

Post by CamelCaseName »

Deimorz wrote: post #162
mhurron wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the link does not always go the the same place. I personally am always clicking on external links when I meant to go to the discussion page. I would have the main link always go to the discussion page, if there is an associated external link, have it listed under the main link. Lets see if I can get this to show what I mean (grabbed from the front page) What is the most 2000s thing you can think of? submitted 5 h…

The way I think of it is that clicking on the title is taking you to the content. For a self-post, the content is posted on reddit itself, so the content location is the same as the comments page. That being said, they've made a few steps toward something closer to your suggestion in some places. For example, if you do a search, the search results behave this way, where clicking the title always takes you to the comm…

What do you mean 'they'? Commenting from the wrong account? ;)

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#185

Post by DrScump »

jonstokes wrote: post #55

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…

  Designers are ruining software in general.
Or, is it that designers making decisions in a vacuum are ruining software in general?

One huge problem with interface design in industry segments for which I am a heavy/detailed user is that the major design choices are made by people who have never actually used the system in question and seek no input from those who have (e.g. Focus Groups, or simply observant-to-potentially-annoying-degrees users like myself).

Case in point: ticket management and sales systems. Example 1: Ticketmaster's mobile resale interface that was replaced in 2014 or so. It was so stupid that if you were seeking, say, 3 tickets for an event, it would show you all listings offering 3 or more... even if you could not possibly purchase 3 from those sets! Many customers unknowingly bought more tickets than requested. Any knowledgeable user would have spotted that; I did in 10 minutes. It remained unchanged and without warning until the whole site was redone.

Example 2: Tickets.com "My Tickets" account interface. In the general case, a given ticket has a barcode; they changed the mobile site to display the barcode when you drill down to ticket detail. Nice idea, since you could then just show your phone at the gate if you forgot your hard tickets. Anyway, also, in many cases, a ticketholder may want to make a note pertaining to a given ticket, e.g. "Given to Dave and Carolyn for anniversary; don't resell these, you idiot."

So, in Spring of 2014 (I think), they decided to have the desktop system allow display of barcodes as well. Um, OK. However, they implemented this by having that overlay/replace the Notes, so therefore you could not only not see any given note, you could not even see that any note had ever been entered. See the hazard here? Poor Dave and Carolyn get shut out at the gate and embarrassed because you later resold their tickets because your careful notation was silently disposed of.

Anyway, after I pointed that out to them, their solution was to roll back and give up on the barcode display feature altogether, rather than provide access to both.

All of these problems (and many others) could have been avoided simply by inviting and encouraging feedback from your power users before tearing out your load-bearing walls of code.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#186

Post by eric_h »

Declanomous wrote: post #144
digi_owl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you would have thought that constantly rearranging pages would have been something that went away alongside dialup...

This is literally the reason why I use ad block. I don't mind ads, but I can't stand webpages where the ad drops in an changes the whole layout. Congrats, you win 0 revenue from me!

Ditto - especially when I'm halfway through the first paragraph of an article and it slides it down offscreen, so I scroll down to keep reading, then the ad goes away and the place I was reading goes back up off screen. It's criminal.

Further, on my phone especially, I like to read articles while on the train. My trip has cell signal at every stop along the way, but not between stations. Before Apple allowed adblockers in Safari, I'd have about a 1/10 chance of actually getting the article to load before I lost signal. Now, it works great just about every time.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#187

Post by cpeterso »

danmaz74 wrote: post #171

I have two links on my bookmark bar. "jqueryfy": javascript:(function(){var s=document.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src',' https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.mi... ;})(); "readability": javascript:$("*").css({color: 'white', background: '#21368c'}) I click the first one and then the second one almost every time I find something long to read on the web (HN comments threads included).…

Firefox and Safari have built-in reader mode (buttons in the address bar) that clear away page clutter and reformat the text.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#189

Post by zeveb »

knieveltech wrote: post #181
zeveb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is about self-expression and it's a small price to pay Is that a small price to pay for worsening the experience of anyone older than maybe 26? I can't even imagine trying to walk my elderly neighbour through installing her own stylesheet, nor trying to explain why none of her sites look right now, even if they are more legible.

Check your ageism bub. Some of us have been online longer than you've been alive.

Ummm, I'm sure you're technically correct about there being folks here who were online before I was born (although there almost certainly aren't a whole lot — I'm pretty old), but my comment was against discriminating against folks based on age-related conditions like declining eyesight.

If you're annoyed that I used my elderly neighbour as an example of someone I wouldn't want to explain stylesheets to: she is an actual person, not a rhetorical device; she's a smart person, but not gifted with computers; she has failing eyesight; I help her with computer questions; I honestly wouldn't want to try to explain custom stylesheets to her.

It'd be better if folks would build accessible pages from the get-go.

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