Does anyone else hate the new model of websites as much as I do? One big, shiny, purty and largely information-free panel after another, for miles and miles of scrolling?
Care to share an example?
It’s the tabletization of web sites. Ultimately Apple’s fault.
Yes. It’s a product of:
[ul]
[li]Designing for mobile/tablet devices first and foremost.[/li][li]More companies that are designing websites that are marketing driven as opposed to content-driven[/li][/ul]
Personally, unless there is truly massive amounts of content that is of value to me (ie, news sites), I hate hate hate websites that push too much “below the fold”.
Yeah, tablet/mobile “friendliness” - meaning it pops right up, fits your phone screen, and is essentially useless beyond that point.
I’d agree except that websites have been “designed by marketing” for a long, long time already. It’s just a micro-iteration of that movement. I am not at all sure how removing nearly all content advances marketing aims, since the site is theoretically the go-to/drive-to information source and not just another layer of advertising, but…
Ah, but it’s not. There’s a new master plan these days, which is that the website is primarily for businesses to collect information about you, the potential customer/client. Websites are changing; they used to be “electronic storefronts” that might be influenced by marketing. They are now becoming marketing tools first, and storefronts second (or not at all, depending on the business). Give us your location, preferences, e-mail, etc etc, and then we’ll reach out to you with special offers!
Customer/prospect management has gotten much more sophisticated, comprehensive, and there are now tools that put it into the hands of smaller businesses.
If forces you to click on buttons (“calls to action”) to get to any content, so that they can identify you as a buyer persona, and then target more communication towards you (theoretically). The more content you get without clicking/giving them information, the less effective the targeting can be. Making you go “ooh, shiny,” while gleefully giving up information about yourself is now the website’s main function. It is not about having a ‘presence,’ or even, in many cases, about making one-time sales.
Add into the mix the fact that marketers and designers are just as easily wowed by “new” layouts as Joe Schmoe, and you see these sites everywhere, as those of us who just want the information as efficiently as possible cry in agony.
Or, wherever possible (certainly in my case), click away and find another site that tells me what I need. When it comes to web content, people are notoriously fickle - I know if I go on a website that gives me a whole load of shiny blah in my face with the actual content buried way down the page, I’ll just close the page and go elsewhere.
What worries me is the trend amongst certain magazine type sites to do this - it opens with a screen filling, generally useless, image, then a bit of content (usually in a thin column, with some promoted content/advertising guff filling up the other 2/3 of the page, then another massive full screen image, and so on. It’s painful for me to read, and some sites drag my (admittedly quite old) laptop to a crawl just trying to render all this crap. One site, which had an article I really needed to read, was so bad I actually found it easier to read it from the source code. :dubious:
I’m just hoping minimalism makes a return to fashion in web design at some point in the future.
Another trend almost guaranteed to make me instantly click away, pretty much out of principle: A popup box, obscuring all the content, asking me to sign up to their newsletter/like them on facebook/whatever. As soon as I open the page. Seriously? At this point I don’t know anything about you apart from the fact that you’re spammy, annoying, entirely marketing driven and know nothing about UX design? And I’m supposed to ‘like’ you? :rolleyes:
I do enjoy it, though, when a site does that sort of popup asking me to fill in a customer satisfaction survey. I always answer quite honestly. 
What you said. I have no idea what we’re talking about.
As I said earlier, the modish Flat Style aka Swiss Style makes all these sites look identical, forcing them to concentrate on content to differentiate them.
Unfortunately since minimalist modernists have no particular content this means one just dumps the site never to return.
Also, not merely Apple at fault, this fat heavy cumbersome leaden look was for a while also called Metro Style, until Microsoft decided to dump the Metro name, once sued for using it.
Which is odd, because Microsoft has been successfully sued against for billions and billions of dollars, so you think they’d get used to it. Or at least write it off to expenses or something.
Yes. At work they’ve redesigned the sites to be phone- and tablet-friendly so the nice picture at the top of the page fills my monitor which isn’t small, and I have to scroll down just to get to any links or info. Our department isn’t trying to sell anything; it is full of dry but useful information and I think we should scrap the photo altogether so folks can get to the useful stuff, but I doubt that will fly since they are trying to standardize the look and feel.
MSNBC is one example. Enormous pictures and cluttered up with tags, upvote, and share buttons. Only the barest hint of what the stories are about, and you have to scroll for ages (or use the useless jumpbar on the right) to actually read the story.
A single page with 10 stories on it, a few small pictures and each story’s lede would have been vastly more useful.
I like blaming Apple for everything bad in the world, so perhaps I was a tad hyperbolic.
However, I wasn’t blaming Apple for creating the style–as you say, the basic look existed already–but for popularizing tablets. Tablets are a shitty experience in every way except for their portability. The content has adapted to that shitty experience, and unfortunately has made things uniformly worse on environments that aren’t so limited.
This is the reason for it. It’s so the web designer doesn’t have to create a separate site that is mobile-friendly. And I also hate this style.
I studied web design a very short eight years ago, and the beautiful, stylish, clever, elegant, CLEAR sites that my classmates and I designed (multiple pages, navigation bar on each page) is dead and gone. Now you just scroll down forever until you fall off the edge of the earth. .
It doesn’t even make sense for tablets. Unless I’m actually going to have to click on something, you can make the page look pretty much normal, just a bit larger on the fonts.
And you can do mobile design and have it look fine. The BBC’s site has been redone for mobile. It just lost a bit of the graphics on top and had some things rearranged. That’s it. Of course, it looks different as you reduce the screen size, but that’s what a good mobile site does.
Good mobile design is dynamic page design.
(Technically, this site would be pretty good mobile page design if it weren’t for simulating a 1024x768 page for older sites.)
Now you’re just being sensible. That won’t fly. Why pay for great design when you can use a quick-and-dirty template?
I completely agree with you, in case that isn’t obvious.
I agree that’s why, but it’s funny because I loathe using “tablet-designed” websites on my tablet. So at least for me, they THINK they’ve “optimized” it for tablets, but they really haven’t.
Thanks, Dr. Strangelove and romansperson. I guess I’m with BigT now: how is that optimised for tablet viewing? It seems like it would be strange and pointless on a tablet, too (though I’ve never really used one.)
Here’s the one that set me off in the first place. Not too surprising that Adobe would use the latest and newest and shiniest, but…
ETA: This isn’t a particularly bad example except that I reached it from a link promising to tell me the details of the update. All it has is shiny panels and vague links that take you to more vague pages.
Google recently changed its page-ranking algorithm so that it punishes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. Really punishes them. (The part in that link about not affecting desktop rankings is pure baloney.)
So a lot of sites desperate for Google hits are adapting their pages to please Google. Which in no way relates to pleasing visitors: mobile or desktop.
Google is the 600 pound gorilla that decides a lot about what you get on the Web.