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How the Web Became Unreadable
261–270 of 354 posts
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. Political views aside (and the post doesn't concern those either), this is quite relevant: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
But the mobile experience sucks :-(
On my S7 Edge, the page is too small to read (except for the headline, obviously).
However, I can pick a column and double-tap it. The Android browser smart-zooms, and I can read the content just fine. If something's too small, I can finger-spread.
For instance, it's easy to smart-zoom the link list in the center column, scroll down to a columnist, finger-spread to increase the target size, and click through to his latest.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#263Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…
From what I've gathered from some (admittedly not in depth) research, the effective contrast of ink on paper for books tends to be around 12:1, and for long form text that tends to be what I shoot for. I find the as-high-as-you-can go contrast of pure black on pure white to be a (tiny) bit of a strain when I'm reading a sufficiently long article.
I see these "all the text on the web is a sea of grey" articles come up every so often, and I agree that the kind of bananas low contrast sites that they point to are problematic. But when I look around, these honestly seem to be outliers. Sites like the New York Times, Washington Post, The AV Club, CNN, and so on tend to be in that 12:1 contrast range or even higher. There are exceptions--Vox is only around 7.5:1 contrast ratio (which surprised me, since I find it pretty readable, but they're using big text in a highly legible typeface). But the worst offenders I find often seem to be sites that I suspect are driven more by engineering departments than designers: Google App Engine and Apple's system documentation are the big examples in this article, for instance. (Apple's consumer-facing web sites tend toward noticeably higher contrast type than the linked fiasco.)
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Everything you say might be right, but there is something extra to jonstokes' comment: ametures and nerds often produce more functional sites than real designers. The mechanism here is that whatever esthetic and psychological principles are in play, an interface must also present the needed info and functionality. Craigslist and HN do that in a more-or-less bullshit free way. UX designers can get caught up in other c…
I find that once you're trying to hide info or functionality it's because you don't know the users workflow. Understanding workflow is the key to usability, at least with LOB apps, trying to cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right. And I am one of the people criticizing ribbon, because I think menus and toolbars have different purposes that shouldn't be conflated (menu is for all possible UI actions with no possibility for user to customize, while toolbar is for most common UI actions and other interactive elements with possibility to customize). With ribbons, the possibility of customization is gone. But to the point, I think the…
Why can't you customize ribbons? Anyway, I don't understand your distinction there, since every part of software can be customized however you like. Most users don't customize, and don't have any need to if the the software was properly designed for their use-case.
> Most users don't customize, and don't have any need to if the the software was properly designed for their use-case.
I don't think it's possible to design general purpose software like word to any specific use case. There are simply too many users and too many use cases, from grandma writing a letter to professionals doing mail merges (or whatever people do with word).
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#266It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything t…
> Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. But modern web design is the contrary. Large big webfonts, distinct ones for headlines and text as beautiful as possible. Yes, sometimes the text is then made grey and oftentimes this is just bad design, but I don't think the texture comaprision is accurate. Here for example, in…
> Large big webfonts
This can be aggravating too, just because I'm on a desktop doesn't mean I have 19" monitors and the browser maximized.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cancer has now spread to each professional, industrial, each institutional site I use. One after another, they fell into the mobile-friendly but desktop-unfriendly and any-real-use-unfriendly fad: white space everywhere, flat design, white text; the amount of information on a screen has been divided by 2, by 3, by 4, I don't know, with wide spaces on the sides, with huge vertical space between each line of inform…
There are practical reasons for it. My business website gets 98% mobile traffic. Pretty much anything I'll do about it, I'll do with mobile on mind. If the original design wasn't responsive by default, I don't think I'd even implement a different view for the desktop.
Maybe you get 98% mobile traffic because your site is unusable on desktops?
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#268Designers 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.…
Designer here, how can we solve this? I'd love to have my work peer reviewed because design is so subjective and I feel like I'm probably making elementary mistakes despite learning for years.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find it to be a feature. I find it infantilising. "Other users didn't like this post, so we'll make it hard to read". I think it was a terrible design decision on an otherwise very clean site.
It's a very helpful hint as to which community contributed content is good quality. Like Stack Overflow making the lower rated answers less obvious (at the bottom). Oh, and SO greys out text too.
On Stack Overflow, where "Quality" can be quantified, this might work (even though stackoverflow slowly is failing - this being one of the reasons).
On mere discussion sites, quality does not equal popularity. Equating these two things leads to echo chambers.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 givi…
Amen.