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Web designs are getting too complicated

websmith.studio

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Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#61

Post by wtetzner »

croes wrote: post #55
PunchyHamster wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's like saying horsepower is irrelevant metric, lap times is you kinda need the one to get the other in the decent place, even if it is not the only one. Lack of performance WILL turn every design into mediocre or worse

Bad performance makes even good design bad but good performance doesn’t make bad design good. Looking at performance is making the second step before the first. Performance is the means to an end, but if you fixate on performance, the means becomes the end

> Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.

I'm not sure I agree. Bad design can ruin a fast UI, and bad performance can ruin a good UI. I'm not sure one is more important than the other, because they're necessary parts of the UX. They should be designed for together, not independently.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#62

Post by wtetzner »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #18
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.

I'm curious about which flows you mean.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#63

Post by owebmaster »

librasteve wrote: post #58

turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business deci…

Making server requests for every interaction is the least grug way of serving html

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#64

Post by owebmaster »

shoeb00m wrote: post #20
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.

There should be no context change from not using React, unless one is a very junior programmer

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#65

Post by [deleted] »

cyberax wrote: post #24
bravesoul2 wrote: post #6

Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?

This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps. Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder... And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.

[deleted]

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#66

Post by owebmaster »

Arainach wrote: post #10
bravesoul2 wrote: post #6

Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?

My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design. This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineer…

It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#67

Post by librasteve »

owebmaster wrote: post #63
librasteve wrote: post #58

turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business deci…

Making server requests for every interaction is the least grug way of serving html

we’re gonna have to agree to differ on that one …

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#69

Post by sgarland »

croes wrote: post #25
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…

Performance is also an irrelevant metric. Usability is.

I get what you’re saying, but I also think the two are strongly correlated.

If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).

It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.

[0]: https://www.mcmaster.com/

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#70

Post by adregan »

rpgbr wrote: post #60

The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.

> The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!

I don’t know about you, but I’m not running flash like it’s the early 2000s.

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