Agreed 100%. I'm all about minimalism and functionality. Get straight to the point, make it easy to use, and don't let irrelevant crap distract people from the information they need to find.
Agreed. The trick is how to do it. We've actually been able to develop almost a mathematical method of breaking apart any website and making it, what we call "TRONgui".
Now we are basically gonna make versions of as many web apps out there as we can find time for. A new forum, blog, wikipedia, social shop (ie eBay), city portals, government portals and the list goes on. We want to offer alternatives to most everything that's out there. We believe very strongly that most of it is fundamentally wrong, all the way at it's roots.
I don't want to get in to the details and reveal what we have identified as 'where it all goes wrong' but rather just build the products and put them out there.
How does it make no sense at all? By most accounts, just about half the web is now mobile devices, and that market is only growing while desktop browsing is shrinking. I appreciate the mentality of "thinking different" (and I loved that ad campaign
) but taking it too far can be a detriment.
If you really want to design the best user experience, wouldn't you want to ensure all your users got the best experience, and not just half (and declining) of them?
My answer to your questions here, was already provided in the part you left out when you quoted me.
When Steve got up on the stage in January 2007, "having the full web in your pocket" was catchy and a good tool to promote their new phone and technology. You could see the whole webpage and pinch and zoom around it. Fast forward 7 years now, and people have realized that's not the most convenient way to do it. Having minuscule text, having to pinch and zoom around, and needing to slide your finger back and forth constantly just to read a paragraph of text turned out to sound better in Apple's pitch than it actually works in real life. Having to pinch and zoom in is clunky, and while the full website is there, it doesn't provide a very good user experience at all. That's the entire reason why we now have responsive and adaptive design.
I think it's web designers who seem to agree this is not the easiest way to do it. Except I prefer it by far personally. And if someone want's to think Apple doesn't have responsive designers employed, as a reason why they don't have a responsive website, well. We certainly feel different about it, and it appears to me that Apple does too.
Like I said, we expect most designers to disagree with us on most of what we do, but we also expect the users to react positively to a TRONgui experience.
So this is where we are placing our bets, others can make their own. And then time will tell.
TRONgui a mission from God to change the internet as we know it. It will break us or make us. Buckle up!
I don't think this is true. Responsive design has only started within the last 2 years and most websites haven't caught up. I'd be willing to bet you'll see a responsive website from Apple sooner rather than later. They've finally realized that the whole pinching and zooming thing isn't nearly as great as the claimed, and most importantly, most users don't like it.
During this summer's WWDC, Apple ran one of their workshops specifically on responsive design. You can watch the video here:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#517-video
The fact that they're now not just acknowledging it, but supporting it and actively teaching participants in their developer conference about it indicates they see the web going in this direction.
Thanks for the link. I watched some of it, but I got bored pretty fast. We are not going to make websites into a 'transformer movie'. We feel a website is a solid object, much like an app on a computer, and it's our job to put days and days of effort into just the structure of the navigation.
We basically feel that the designers haven't even figured out what structuring means. They think it's A, we're betting it's B.
We can take apart any website and structure it completely different. It's become a process for us, a methodology that is very very different than what's out there right now.
In the end it will be the users who decides if we are right or wrong. We have already placed our bets. Time will tell.
You should care about the code. Just because many developers make crappy user experiences following standards doesn't mean you shouldn't be using standards. They're standards for a reason and coding to the current standards is independent of the design and actual visual user experience.
We care first about the user experience, and second about the code.
And we think the users do too. If the web designers out there did also, the internet would look every different than today.
We want to change this.
There's so many devices out there that browse the internet now that not following the standards will detriment your product. What happens when someone tries to visit your site on a screenreader? Without the correct standardized markup, your site simply won't work on that screen reader, and that visitor will never be able to find the information they were seeking. That's just one example, but it's a perfect example to show why following standards is critical to making sure your users get the best experience possible regardless of what device they visit your site on.
Standards are also critical for cross-browser compatibility and search engine optimization.
We first make sure that the majority of users will have the best possible user experience, and second that the minority will also get the same experience. It seems that most designers care more about whether or not Tables are old fasioned, than the user experience.
Don't take my post the wrong way. It's a bit critical but I'm just trying to offer my best advice on how to improve your product. I like the visual concept of your site and your drive to keep it as simple and user friendly as possible, but I think in order to make it practical and usable in the real world, these are some things you need to consider. User experience is one of the most critical parts of a website, but with the way the web is now with all the different devices that use it, that user experience needs to work well device classes, not just one.
I think our products can be improved quite a lot actually, in terms of code. It's just not our first priority, and you gotta start somewhere.
We began with the user experience.
