Why is website design so awful today, generally?

[nickdalzell1]

Why not have both and make more users happy?

Get rid of the hamburger menus, the sidebars and too much javascript and given the larger screens of today's phones, you won't even need a mobile site! Desktop users won't suffer, either. Keep it Simple, Stupid was once the philosophy. Function over form.

Too many sites today are becoming the modern version of Geocities' flashing fonts, acursed banners, animated cursors, and autoplay media the modern Midi soundtracks. None of it was necessary and most simply annoying. Many ads are hidden trojans.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Why not have both and make more users happy?

Get rid of the hamburger menus, the sidebars and too much javascript and given the larger screens of today's phones, you won't even need a mobile site! Desktop users won't suffer, either. Keep it Simple, Stupid was once the philosophy. Function over form.

I especially hate this trend where they make the desktop site look like a mobile site. You're right... hamburger menus suck on a giant computer monitor. It's like they didn't even try to make it look good on desktop.

However... they probably looked at their traffic logs and saw that 80% of their visitors are on mobile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And I know you keep saying "phone screens are so big that we don't need a mobile site"

But I disagree.

I've already shown you what a "huge" phone screen looks like compared to a laptop screen. And they're not even close.

I don't want a full desktop website on a smaller mobile screen... even if I can rotate the phone. It's simply not the same.

Desktops are wide and can show multiple columns... phones are narrow and only show a single column.

The reason we have mobile responsive design is so the same content can flow depending on the screen size and/or shape. And good sites should flow. There's no need to make a separate mobile site if the real site can collapse and reflow to fit the narrow smartphone screen.

I build all my sites in Wordpress... and the themes I use are all mobile responsive. I design for the desktop... but they look great on mobile too. I don't have to do anything special.

But yes... some sites seem like they design for mobile first... so they look simple and childish on our giant computer screens. That sucks.

 

[nickdalzell1]

See, I'm in the minority that I use a 2009 browser on my S20 FE to force all sites to load default desktop view (when possible, it has a user agent setting) because I despise all mobile sites. If I wanted a mobile view of any kind, I use the app which is laid out much better. Call me crazy, but I totally bought what Steve Jobs said about 'full desktop experience' and once I get used to something good, I don't want it gimped in any way.

the hatred of mobile sites actually dates back to the Cingular WAP browser days. My short lived use of a RAZR V3 made me really hate mobile sites since that phone was more than capable of loading full sites at the time and any difference between what I expected irked me to no end.

I was once a mod for the DTV USA forum and I often used the V3 to browse the forum, and I sent feedback to the devs there to NOT force a mobile site since I couldn't even post anything from the phone or view graphics in any WAP mobile site. They luckily listened. I wish devs cared about feedback because all I ever get today is "get used to it, you curmudgeon!"

Whatever happened to companies trying to make customers happy instead of of the reverse?

 

[Michael Scrip]

See, I'm in the minority that I use a 2009 browser on my S20 FE to force all sites to load default desktop view (when possible, it has a user agent setting) because I despise all mobile sites. If I wanted a mobile view of any kind, I use the app which is laid out much better. Call me crazy, but I totally bought what Steve Jobs said about 'full desktop experience' and once I get used to something good, I don't want it gimped in any way.

But good sites aren't gimped. They just look different because the screen is smaller and is a different shape. (yes even "huge" phones)

A good site should have all the same stuff on mobile as it does on a desktop. Mobile responsive sites don't usually remove items when viewed on a phone. They just have things in different places or in different styles. (hamburger dropdown menu instead of the wide desktop menu)

Apps are designed to get in and out quickly, right? And you like apps.

Well... a good website should reflow to be like an app. And most do. All the sites I build do.

Yes... Steve Job made a helluva good web browser on the early iPhone. He did what had to be done... at that time.

But I'm glad most websites today can display a decent experience on mobile. I was never a fan of all the "pinching and zooming" back then. But that's just me.

We can agree to disagree. But websites aren't going back to displaying their full desktop website on a mobile screen. Hell... this whole thread is about how websites today seem to be focused on the mobile experience.



EDIT... you added more after I already replied. Yes... WAP browsers sucked... no arguments there.

But a good website with a good responsive design that looks good on desktop and mobile is nothing like the old WAP days...

I'm sorry you were scarred by that experience. I hear ya!

 

[nickdalzell1]

Actually, the default YouTube site on mobile browsers ain't nothing like the app. However, the old 'm.youtube.com' is. Most modern sites are so different as to be horrible for me. I would rather pan and zoom as Steve intended iPhone to do in 2007 any day over a garbage mobile site. I despise hamburger menus, endless scrolling, and tons of javascript. If it's different enough to not be familiar to me, I refuse to use it. That's one reason I never update my apps. I know where every function is over time that I can use them blind if need be. I at least have some level of control over the way an app looks. Websites I do not. No dev accepts feedback and always acts like I'm some old man by posting a response of that Simpsons 'old man yells at cloud' image or some other garbage response. Never taking criticism. Most devs and app devs if you complain about updates refuse to revert to what worked before, and just say 'get used to it'. That's not friendly one bit.

I just wish more people took 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' into heart. I'm sick of 'change for change's sake' and 'if it ain't broke, I'll fix it until it is'

I can't speak for you since I don't know what site you admin for and I probably would have no use for it anyway. I'm old fashioned. I prefer Android 2.3. I prefer skeuo. For myself sites stopped being usable once 2012 ended.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Actually, the default YouTube site on mobile browsers ain't nothing like the app. However, the old 'm.youtube.com' is. Most modern sites are so different as to be horrible for me. I would rather pan and zoom as Steve intended iPhone to do in 2007 any day over a garbage mobile site. I despise hamburger menus, endless scrolling, and tons of javascript. If it's different enough to not be familiar to me, I refuse to use it. That's one reason I never update my apps. I know where every function is over time that I can use them blind if need be. I at least have some level of control over the way an app looks. Websites I do not. No dev accepts feedback and always acts like I'm some old man by posting a response of that Simpsons 'old man yells at cloud' image or some other garbage response. Never taking criticism. Most devs and app devs if you complain about updates refuse to revert to what worked before, and just say 'get used to it'. That's not friendly one bit.

Gotcha.

This is my 2nd recommendation for us to "agree to disagree"

Cheers.

 

[nickdalzell1]

Thanks for hearing me out though, instead of saying 'get used to it you old man' like most. Open minds is always a good thing.

 

[macnoob76]

Nobodsy care about design those days. Everyone wants to be on the first position in google ranking. Google loves lots of text, so if you know about that you will add wall of the text one the first page. Second is the price of the website. Professional website can cost a lot of money, but you can get really cheap one from "web developer" working in his basement for few bucks.

I know a lot of people who just buy ready to go website on wix.com or nicepage . You need to put some love into website even without coding to make sure your website looks nice. I think most of the people doesn't care as long is online, cheap.

 

[nickdalzell1]

The worst part isn't as much that sites are meant to show mobile view on a mobile device (although I still hate it). it's when a mobile site is shown on a laptop that truly infuriates me. Such as Facebook, Twitter, or Credit Karma today. It's like those admins don't even believe in laptops!

 

[Tozovac]

Damn I’m sick of ellipses being used to truncate lengthy labels or buttons for the sake of (i.e., the excuse of) providing ”a clean, modern-looking appearance” and/or to adapt to a small mobile screen. The labels are completely useless since there’s not enough text to discern what the heck the labels stand for at first glance. More work is required to investigate/open the tab or link or button to confirm what it says.

Any designer reading this who sees truncated labels in their work (sometimes surrounded by a lot of blank white space, ever so ironically) should self-check their work more stringently and with an added dose of reality.

Efficiency thru intuitive design >>> Clean, modern, “efficient-looking” design

 

[Akrapovic]

Do you have an example?

 

[Tarian]

However... they probably looked at their traffic logs and saw that 80% of their visitors are on mobile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apparently:
”85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good as or better than their desktop website”
So what does that tell us ?
That desktop websites are to be aspired to ?

Or are we to believe that, already, mobile sites are "better" than their desktop version" ?
If the latter, are we to believe that less content, hamburger menus, icons without labels, loooong scroll sites, inability to pinch & zoom are all "better" ?

I don't want a full desktop website on a smaller mobile screen... even if I can rotate the phone. It's simply not the same.

Desktops are wide and can show multiple columns... phones are narrow and only show a single column.

You "don't want" - and that's fine.
We just want the choice of accessing a full-service desktop site - ideally on both desktop and phone. That would be our choice.

The problem is that desktop users are having mobile-designed sites foisted on them - almost universally.

Phones are only "narrow" if held that way.
When my son got an early smart phone, he could show us our preferred website sites - landscape - with all the content and navigation.
Pinch & zoom was not a problem.
I was really looking forward to getting my own smartphone so that I could all my usual interneting on the move.

Then designers broke the internet. So I never did get that smartphone....
....yet I now have to put up with mobile-designed sites on my desktop.

The reason we have mobile responsive design is so the same content can flow depending on the screen size and/or shape. And good sites should flow. There's no need to make a separate mobile site if the real site can collapse and reflow to fit the narrow smartphone screen.

I build all my sites in Wordpress... and the themes I use are all mobile responsive.

Exactly. Many, many sites have been re-designed as Responsive.
But they do not just "collapse and reflow to fit the narrow smartphone screen".
They "collapse and flow" on a desktop too - just because the User chooses to reduce window size - to do what "windows" were designed for - i.e. have two or more windows open side-by-side

But yes... some sites seem like they design for mobile first... so they look simple and childish on our giant computer screens. That sucks.

"some sites" ???
Our criticism is that the vast majority of previously use-able sites have been made worse by redesigning for "mobile first".

 

[Tozovac]

Do you have an example?

I’ll post screenshots of the next instances I encounter in websites or apps or operating systems. I treat them all alike in the context of this thread since everything is (so sadly) morphing towards looking alike. All this universal application of interface design across systems sounds great on paper but, to me sadly just results in amplifying the negative trade-offs from force-fitting apps, sites, and operating systems to look so alike on different devices varying wildly in screen size & input method (tap vs. mouse vs. keyboard).

Most recently I was very frustrated today dealing with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC in Windows 10 which was “upgraded” to a supremely unintuitive flat-design rework where the various tabs representing open files truncates the file name to where it’s impossible to differentiate similar-titled files using the tabs alone. I forget how it was in the prior revision but I think the tabs showing file names were larger and showed more of (or all) the file names.

 

[Nermal]

They "collapse and flow" on a desktop too - just because the User chooses to reduce window size - to do what "windows" were designed for - i.e. have two or more windows open side-by-side

Don't forget the ones (like this very forum) that refuse to 'grow' when you make the window larger than a certain size!

 

[Michael Scrip]

Our criticism is that the vast majority of previously use-able sites have been made worse by redesigning for "mobile first".

Yep... and that's why I said in that same line you quoted:

"...mobile-first sites look simple and childish on our giant computer screens. That sucks."

Generally I don't have a problem with responsive sites on a mobile screen. I was never a fan of pinching-and-zooming. And I don't think PaZ is coming back since designers are so into mobile/responsive sites.

MY biggest complaint is when a website doesn't look good on a big desktop screen. I'm primarily a desktop user. My smartphone browsing is infrequent.

So I want a website to look good when I'm on a desktop. I don't want hidden hamburger menus and other silliness when I'm browsing on my 24" desktop monitor.

I would prefer websites that are designed for desktop... then scale down for mobile.

UNFORTUNATELY... websites today seem to design for mobile first... but they don't scale up for desktop.

That's what makes me sad.

 

[nickdalzell1]

I actually got that smartphone that properly displays webpages (and all its apps are full of skeuo glory!) The Samsung Galaxy SII, $50 on Amazon. I actually ordered another for my other line. The devices exist, at least. Always nice to get what I want and re-use tech intead of it being tossed out and continuing the consumerist lifestyle. We only have one planet to live on and it's getting too full of e-waste. Ironically enough, it's long out of support for Google and privacy is a lot better, and on top of that, I haven't gotten one single unknown call since activating it a week ago.

 

[polyphenol]

One of the things that keeps annoying me is the use of images for important information.

It is widespread to see ingredients, allergen warnings, and other important and legally-required information (in UK, at least) provided as poor quality images.

Often difficult to read and hopelessly inaccessible to anyone who needs to use a screen-reader. Even with quite decent eyes I frequently find them unreadable - regardless screen size, zooming, etc. OCR doesn't stand an earthly.

You also cannot search the page to find the information. I should be able to find in page "ingredients" or "allergy". Not have to search up and down and scroll (often horizontally) through multiple images.

I simply go elsewhere. But I am often try to help someone else who might have bought the product and is asking about what is in it for reasons related to health.

 

[Akrapovic]

One of the things that keeps annoying me is the use of images for important information.

It is widespread to see ingredients, allergen warnings, and other important and legally-required information (in UK, at least) provided as poor quality images.

Often difficult to read and hopelessly inaccessible to anyone who needs to use a screen-reader. Even with quite decent eyes I frequently find them unreadable - regardless screen size, zooming, etc. OCR doesn't stand an earthly.

You also cannot search the page to find the information. I should be able to find in page "ingredients" or "allergy". Not have to search up and down and scroll (often horizontally) through multiple images.

I simply go elsewhere. But I am often try to help someone else who might have bought the product and is asking about what is in it for reasons related to health.

Someone posted an example of a "good" site in here earlier which was a shed sales thing. Accessibility was atrocious and I said that. the usual suspects shot me down.

 

[Tozovac]

Test

 

[nickdalzell1]

One of the most annoying things I've seen (and why I can't imagine how anyone can browse without adblock on) is the 'gross out' ads. At work, they use Yahoo! Mail (yeah, the AOL of 2021) so there's two ads on top of one another on the sidebar on the right side of the page. 90% the time they're showing infected toes or innards and advertising for '90% doctors can't identify this pathogen CLICK HERE' and so forth. I'd love to find whomever did those ads so I can wring their neck.

 

[Tozovac]

I posted this elsewhere in a discussion about Jony’s new pretentious website for LoveFrom, but it applies strongly here.

I‘m glad Apple keeps moving forward after Jony.

An anti-uber-minimalist MacBook hardware coup in 2021.

Let’s hope for a software coup in 2022. Let’s hope Apple interface design gets less flat, less monochromatic, less anti-button, less Less.

Apple’s Product Design Has Improved Since Jony Ive Left

The pendulum is swinging back from cool to practical.

www.bloomberg.com

 

[nickdalzell1]

I posted this elsewhere in a discussion about Jony’s new pretentious website for LoveFrom, but it applies strongly here.

I‘m glad Apple keeps moving forward after Jony.

An anti-uber-minimalist MacBook hardware coup in 2021.

Let’s hope for a software coup in 2022. Let’s hope Apple interface design gets less flat, less monochromatic, less anti-button, less Less.

Apple’s Product Design Has Improved Since Jony Ive Left

The pendulum is swinging back from cool to practical.

www.bloomberg.com

Have you considered downgrading? My Galaxy SII is actually very nice. In fact, I like its TouchWiz even better than the Nature UX variant (on later versions of Android) that I had become accustomed to. It actually resembles iOS 6 more than Android. Even the Visual Voicemail reminds me of the intuitive interface of iOS 6's same app--including easily identifiable 'delete' and 'play' buttons.

I knew something was off in Human Interface Design the instant my grandmother couldn't even unlock a modern iPhone. Remember 'slide to unlock?' how easy was that for anyone, from kids to the elderly? It was perfect. Now there's literally no visual cue to unlock mom's iPhone 11 Pro. What happened to being a device for everyone?

Either way, I'm on a Galaxy SII and enjoying every skeuomorphic moment of it. Even the notepad app reminds me of the one in iOS 6 (Samsung even has a woodgrain background behind the 'paper')

Only thing that's really missing that I wish I had back was Coverflow in the Music app. I suppose Apple would had sued Samsung if they copied it, though.

 

[iHorseHead]

It's an off topic, but I still don't understand why Flash was so hated and the old websites in general.
People talk about 'creativity' and nowadays every website looks the same (pretty much).

How wasn't this website creative? Fort Minor was very creative and beautiful back in 2005. All the bands had different websites, but now they're mostly the same. True Crime, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) all had beautiful and creative websites. Nowadays many companies just have the same website or just a Facebook page.

 

[nickdalzell1]

I don't know why Flash got killed off either (basically EOL'd NewGrounds.com) it was far faster and less resource intensive than JAVA or dare I say it, VRML was!

It wasn't even Adobe that killed it off--it was Apple! Apple hated flash from day one, meanwhile we on Android were enjoying it!

the good news is seeing the older sites are still possible tanks to the old net. Whoever made that site did us all a great justice. I use the 2010 variant of ChickenWingsComics.com just to read them now, as they also made their site worse in like 2015 or something.

Apparently, boring is the new normal today. Everything commoditized, homogenized, heck, individuality be darned!

 

[mctrials23]

Come now, flash was god awful and there is a damn good reason it was killed off.

Feels like most of the opinions here are from people who have 0 experience of web dev and how the modern web works. You do not want to go back to 10 years ago and you don't want flash to still be a thing.