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How the Web Became Unreadable

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Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#201

Post by braveo »

falcolas wrote: post #99
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…

Oddly enough, Reddit becomes much more usable with RES and keyboard navigation. It's primarily a consumption site, which makes the ability to expand images inline and navigate with the keyboard very valuable. The vanilla experience where you're constantly linking off to other heavy-weight sites and frequently reloading the reddit page when you come back (a trend I wish modern web browsers would burn) is rather negati…

I use RES, but I hate most parts of it.

Have you ever compared the page load times of reddit with and without RES? It's horrific. And adjusting the settings? they have search functionality for the settings because there's so many settings.

The only things I use from RES are the account manager and the subreddit manager. I hate the never ending reddit with a burning passion, and don't even get me started on the highlighting posts that you've clicked on crap.

RES is a bloated monstrosity.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#203

Post by braveo »

zeveb wrote: post #110
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…

> I seriously want to punch a hipster every time I have to use an app that used to work and has now been designed to death. Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days. I just want to sit folks down in a chair and ask them why they hell they broke something that needed no fixing. It wasn't a problem, and now it is. I want to quote the 90s classic Billy Madison at them: > Mr. Madison,…

> Me too. In fact, it concerns me how angry stupid decisions make me these days.

Are you me? I'm the epitome of the old grumpy programmer. I have this love/hate relationship with technology. One the one hand I still love it, on the other hand I hate 99.9% of the tech I come into contact with because it's always shit for some reason or other.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#204

Post by peteri »

My own personal pet hate on this is the m.countdown.tfl.gov.uk website. This used to be super usable on a phone, pretty plain text, urls where I could use the "text" number on each bus stop to jump straight to where I wanted to go by altering the address.

The new version is awful doing requests to the web for each keystroke into a search box (doesn't work well on a bus when signal drops out) urls for a bus stop no longer have any relationship to the SMS text number. Loads of ads so making it slower.

AND my biggest pain is that I can't filter by multiple buses at a bus stop. Once upon a time I had the north bound Monument stop with a filter for the four buses that go from there past my office (There are 13 bus routes on that bus stop).

It does look a bit prettier but when I'm out and about I want low bandwidth functionality.

Note to self: Go and see how hard the tfl API is to use....

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#205

Post by flukus »

ThomPete wrote: post #138
treehau5 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed. Wow that's the first time I have heard the problem phrased this way. Usually it's the other way around -- the designers and product leads want to pile on so many features and the backend devs can't keep up, so the codebase turns into a rotten pile of shit.

I don't think thats actually true. Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.

> Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission.

That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#206

Post by flukus »

chrisdotcode wrote: post #63
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…

The usability issues compound when that page was created with 1.2MB of JS (and another 2MB of ads), and I have to see a loading spinning wheel when it could have been easily been static content. ...And then when the page loads, I accidentally click an ad instead of a link because the ad moved over the content that I was reading to offer me 10% of joining the exclusive mailing list.

This should be something the browser handles. Only register a click of the element was there a few milliseconds ago when you "mentally clicked".

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#207

Post by Silhouette »

state wrote: post #163
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…

As a designer, I agree completely. The problem is: interaction design really is a discipline in its absolute infancy. It's not graphic design. It's not engineering. It's not architecture. Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and start doing it. And the people who decide to ship shitty designs you're complaining about are more concerned with 'pageviews' or 'installs' (and in turn, their bonus) than actual usability.…

It's hard to disagree, but I think the problem is more fundamental: way, way too many people working in tech assume that because Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft are huge and financially successful overall, that means they know what they're doing and should be emulated.

This has been true in recent years with the trendy but awful design. It's not just the typography. The obsession with flat design and giving up all the distinctiveness and affordances of other styles might even be worse.

It's also been going on for a long time with assuming if Google says it in its guidelines for webmasters then it must be good, as opposed to being good for Google's search engine.

It's even going on with software, specifically the various libraries and tools these organisations produce. Some of those libraries and tools are competently executed, but few are as remarkable or transformative as the hero worship might suggest.

This culture of emulation naturally leads to the kind of bland, homogeneous, poorly conceived work that is all too prevalent in our industry today. How could it not?

Ironically, I was just reading another HN post about a jobs board for older geeks, and the related discussion about the endemic problem with ageism in our industry. What we are talking about in this discussion is literally what happens when you hire a bunch of very young, very inexperienced, very untrained people, given them very snazzy hardware for their very good eyesight and their very dexterous hands to work with, give them effectively unlimited resources but very limited accountability and management, and leave them to run the show.

Anyone who wants to do better certainly can do it, just by studying relevant fields like graphic design and usability and by acquiring the necessary skill and experience (or, for businesses, by hiring people like that). But unsurprisingly, the people who are willing to go against the grain tend to be those who have been around for long enough to have other ideas and to have seen the same sorts of mistakes made before, and who wants to listen to them when you can go watch someone from the Apple team wax lyrical about their new barely legible font, someone from the React team misunderstanding basic MVC, or someone from Google who has never run a small business web site in their life telling everyone what makes good quality content?

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#208

Post by gabemart »

mhurron wrote: post #105
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…

> Reddit works You know what I really hate about reddit? The inconsistency of the links. If the link is a self.subreddit link, it goes to the discussion thread, if it was a submitted link to a location outside of reddit, the link goes to that page and to see the discussion thread you have to click on the small 'comment' link. I wouldn't say reddit works any more than a 'designed to death' site, just that it hasn't be…

> If the link is a self.subreddit link, it goes to the discussion thread, if it was a submitted link to a location outside of reddit

The link goes to the content, wherever that is. Reddit was designed to share content. In the early days they didn't even have comments.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#209

Post by ThomPete »

flukus wrote: post #205
ThomPete wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think thats actually true. Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.

> Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.

Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case?

For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too.

So not sure what you are referring to.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#210

Post by flukus »

ThomPete wrote: post #209
flukus wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission. That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.

Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case? For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too. So not sure what you are referring to.

~10 years ago UX was all about adding animations, glow effects and colors as hints to the user. Colors are still used (but much more sparingly) and animations and glow effect have fallen out of fashion.
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