Why is website design so awful today, generally?

[paardenkapper]

What an outdated concept of building a website. The only reason behind using images for text is not having the license for the proper font.

 

[Tozovac]

Due to the need for websites to be responsive, hence having the same functionality on mobile, tablet, desktop - most websites follow the same column based style and only differ in fonts/sizes, colour and to some extend shapes. We used to build websites in Photoshop and slice them to extract images.

Judging as a ux designer it is kind of appreciated that websites get more and more similar to each other. You don't need to learn how to use a website. People tend to think more in terms of accessibility and keeping things tidy.

But some of the biggest issues I personally see would seem to have nothing to do with responsive design...and nothing to do with "unnecessary uniqueness at the expense of instant familiarity."

Low contrast thin font on white backgrounds...text as buttons...no positive confirmation of what's "selected"....tiny tap/touch points (especially when text is used as buttons) are completely covered by the fingertip so you're not sure if it's pressed or not and sometimes have to repeatedly re-rap...

I think the reason was the shift to minimalist design that was driven by big playas like Microsoft and Apple.

...

Apple, well… they then introduced iOS 7. Jonny Ive said it was good. My poor eyes still cannot adjust to excessive white colors, lack of shades, thin fonts and lack of intuitive elements.

I agree so much. Jony's pushing minimalist hardware tactics (that work for hardware) onto software. we're still recovering.

Also maybe it is because there is now a new generation of UI designers and lack of good managers who would like to push some kind of innovation. People care more about profit than about investing in something that looks actually good. Because investments in their minds are always expenses, i.e. lost profit. This is probably why iOS haven’t had any redesign since 2013🤣

There definitely needs to be some change. I am tired of this minimalistic-everything

Me too. And I agree with everything you said. Forced unnecessary innovation, just to have something different. Happens all over. Look at BMW, Lexus, and Audi grilles. Mostly horrendous caricatures of past classic, elegant designs which were deemed "tired" I assume.

 

[avro707]

Actually, it should run way faster now, no excuse if a website doesn't. Text and vectors are way smaller, plenty of optimisation techniques available where images are required, CDNs are common, cheap and geolocated.

The sites I work with are pretty fast.

We don’t use lots of images, other stuff is made small as well. And they work great on mobiles. Where it gets difficult is the authoring load on a huge platform with a lot of people on doing work and publishing lots of content. You really have to be efficient in your development.

Also agree text should be text, never images. It’s also easier to update for the web authors when it isn’t an image.

 

[paardenkapper]

You can use Google lighthouse to measure your page loading speed - the fast it is - the better your page rank will be.
And I think that is important.

Thinking of people in developing countries they often have bad phone reception below 3G standard so minimalism is good in a way. Using ultra-thin fonts in web design is a bad decision - I agree.