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Web 2.0 Distracts from Good Design
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon May 14, 2007 09:11 AM
from the but-I-like-a-jumbled-mess dept.
from the but-I-like-a-jumbled-mess dept.
stevedcc writes "The BBC is running a story about web 2.0 and usability, including comments from Jakob Nielsen stating "Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design".
From the article:
"He warned that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. Sites peppered with personalization tools were in danger of resembling the 'glossy but useless' sites at the height of the dotcom boom."
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Old fashioned (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Old fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Old fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Old fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's definitely not emacs, eclipse or VI(M) but it's awfully good and has nice auto-complete features. And if used properly it can help you stick to standards better. It also can do direct FTP editing, another big plus for me.
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Re:Old fashioned (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Old fashioned (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, what? I do web-dev for a living, and our team currently has two designers using DW for HTML generation. While it's not a beautiful work of art, it's hardly locking you in to using DW only.
The thing locking people into DW is that i
Re: (Score:2)
> days hand coded their HTML with close integration with CSS,
> because thats the only way you can really ensure a minimal
> amount of code, cross browser compatibility, good SEO, and
> ease of updates.
Well I guess this *is* old fashioned. Right now you tend store the content in a database of some form. Some form like XML structure. Then you load this structure and transform it to HTML. The only thing that you handcode is the templa
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
echo "<title>"
echo $title
echo "<title>"
vs.
html_render_title($node.title)
The first one is prone to typos (as you type tags by hand), the other one not because function ge
Re:Old fashioned (Score:4, Insightful)
I also stick to hand-editing html, however I also use a lot of automatically generated html. For instance, when formatting a computer language for syntax emphasis automatic coding not only saves work but makes less errors than hand coding. Also, when creating tables I often use small Perl scripts to insert the data into the html.
But I always cut and paste the result into an html file that I edit by hand. I've never found a WYSIWYG html editor that gives me full control over how my pages will look.
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Re: Old fashioned (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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I really dislike sites that use flashy content but don't have an alternative access to a simplified version. Whenever I encounter one I won't even bother using it in the future.
All good things in moderation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And what most people don't even realise: it's actually the easiest way! Don't write a completely new interface in AJAX, instead just call existing pages with an additional xml=1 parameter. The target page still does whatever you want it to do on the server-side, with the only difference that it sends back the XML (or encode
Some explain this to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Some explain this to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a story that reoccurs every few years when a new technology comes along. Somebody comes up with a new technique/technology/approach, and gets a lot of attention because it's quite useful. Then the hype engine goes into overdrive, PHBs start putting it on job advertisements, and people get book deals. A multitude of copy & paste monkeys buy the books, get the jobs and apply that technique/technology/approach to everything they see, with no understanding of when it's actually useful. The industry gets flooded with a bunch of one-trick ponies.
This happened with frames, JavaScript, Java, Flash, DHTML, ActiveX, Ajax, and now it's "Web 2.0"'s turn. Eventually, the field will settle down and there won't be quite so many fanboys around — they'll either broaden their skills and get a clue, their business will fail, or they will get fired. And then things will be relatively stable until the next big thing comes along.
So I guess you're right, this is an ongoing problem, but it's still news when the cycle starts again.
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Re:Some explain this to me? (Score:4, Informative)
This is Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert who regularly gets flamed for advocating more spartan designs and fewer distracting special effects. You're approximately 100% wrong about what he thinks "good design" is.
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Re:Some explain this to me? (Score:4, Interesting)
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No it isn't. That's largely a myth propagated by bad designers who resent being told that they are over the top, the odd line here and there in an article taken out of context, and people like you, who seem to repeat the myth without having read his actual opinions. It's true that he used to make a bigger deal
I'm to s3cks1 f0r my3 (Score:3, Funny)
Yep. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I thought our current one *looked* better too.
Management 'distracts good design' (Score:5, Insightful)
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Truer words have never been spoken... (err typed)
drop shadows and mouse hovers (Score:3, Insightful)
Adding simple fortune-cookie CGI scripts, html tables with round corners, and javascript mouse-hover-active colors doesn't really make a site more useful. Sure, they can add to the mood if everything else is already well thought-out, but they can't save a bad site. That's Web 1.0 gloss.
With the newer sites, there's just as much crap that adds practically nothing. Expandable submenus in sidebars with cute > marks, dynamic community tagging options, dynamic community inbox viewing and sorting, and the ever-present use of rich gradient shading in every header tag. That's Web 2.0 gloss.
Hrm... I seem to have described an awful lot of Slashdot features. Curious.
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Hype and more hype (Score:2, Interesting)
How can Nielsen miss the HUGE advancements in usability that these technologies have granted us? Sites that are designed as applications -- say, gMail -- no longer (as of years ago) have to be restr
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Look at Myspace, these people go "OMG MUSIC ON MY WEBSITE! SO COOL!" but have no damn clue how annoying it is, or how it eats bandwidth and makes their profiles pretty much unusable for Dial up users. But they don't know about this because "ZOMG SO COOL!!!"
See why there is a backlash now? Giv
He says this as if it's something new. (Score:2, Troll)
I hate to steal his thunder, but when have web firms ever payed attention to good design? I'm sure that such companies do exist, but every contract I've seen for a website design has resulted in something that would look absolutely gorgeous in print, but lacks usability when transfered to the more interactive medium of the web.
If you ask these firms to follow a particular procedure for develop
What I find... (Score:3, Interesting)
The makers seem either unaware of or uninterested in users who aren't already knee-deep in their competitors.
Pssh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The man in the article himself states clearly Web 2.0 is simply the "latest fad". It's simply the most recent in a long stream of red herrings chased by ignorant companies in an attempt to be web savvy.
The root of the problem is that the people who understand web design and make webpages are beholden unto managers, bosses, and other autorities who haven't the faintest idea what a good webpage does or looks like. The web designers bring prototypes, designs and nifty things to these people and get asked stupid questions such as "Is it Web 2.0". They want everything the internet has to offer in their webpage, whether or not it makes any sense for it to be there.
Web 2.0 is another potentially awesome facet of the internet being turned into a collective migraine for web designers.
Yahoo TV (Score:2)
And now my bank is going down the same road with their online bill payment tool. *sigh*.
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Since when? (Score:2)
Web 2.0 == Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone gets such a hardon trying to come up with new crazy new ways of doing things that have been done the same way since the dawn of the interwebs. They forget that they've been done that way for a reason... they work. People know what to expect. And they find themselves at ease and in a comfortable state when surfing within those parameters.
That's not to say there should be no innovation, but that innovation should make things easier to understand and use, not scare your customers away.
Article is definitely wrong... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh and whilst I know that mangling the English language has become an artform here on Slashdot, surely "Web 2.0 distracts good design" is bad even by our (admittedly low) standards.
* Courtesy of The Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator [emptybottle.org].
What is Web2.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
The first characteristic doesn't need any new technology: Slashdot is a good example of a web site containing lots of user-contributed contents, and works for ages. No need for a 2.0 version of the web.
The second one is newer: we already had DHTML, but didn't have XMLHttpRequest. This is where abuse can lead to bad design and bad usability, IMO.
My advices to web developers: just because the content of your web site is dynamic and the site contains some forms doesn't mean you have a web application like GMail! Most of the time, it's just a web site, and should work like a traditional web site: the back button should work, opening pages in new windows or new tabs should work.
Just because you may refresh the body of the page without reloading it entirely doesn't mean you should. Think about why frames are usually avoided when you plan using AJAX: it might cause the same annoyances.
Avg experience declining (Score:3, Interesting)
The worst are the sites that underline every noun and if your mouse accidentally passes over one of those words, a big ad box pops up that you have to close. How did it ever occur to someone to make a site where you aren't even free to move your mouse around if you want to without your reading being interrupted?
It also seems like the big, rich companies are the worst offenders. Like they can afford to piss off visitors, and we'll just take it... 'cause you know MSN is such a great site. Yuk. Usability has been going downhill since forever.... blaming web 2.0 is barking up the wrong tree. Maybe try blaming the boom of web advertising.
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah...
Just like our parents' generation grew up to watch less television.
Nielsen a sellout (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html [useit.com]
Usability includes being able to access the content without using proprietary software, Jakob!
ANYTHING new and hyped.... (Score:3, Informative)
Thus when ANYTHING is new and buzz-wordy, it will be thrown randomly at websites helter-scelter but the first type of designer. Meanwhile, thoughtful designers look for positive and useful ways to incorporate it.
If you go into a room full of people showing proper decorum except for one loud, obnoxious person, it is the loud obnoxious person that will stand out. Thus, at first, the throw-the-buzzword-at-the-screen examples of the new technology/trend will stand out.
Eventually, the buzzword people move onto the next buzzword. At this point, either the thoughtful designers have figured out how to incorperate the technology/trend into good design (in which case it just becomes part of the basic fabric of the web, like CSS)-- or else they haven't, and it goes the way of the BLINK tag and those animated-gif "under construction" things.
The fact that bad designers use the "next new thing" in really bad designs doesn't say anything one way or the other about what value the "next new thing" has to the web as a whole.
Google Groups 2.0ed-up (Score:3, Insightful)
Lesson: Use Ajax *only* when "traditional" HTML is not a reasonable match. Don't reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. There are good uses for Ajax-like stuff, but this was just not one of them. Somebody at Google is fad chasing.
Pure HTML (Score:3, Insightful)
And they didn't yet come up with a simple solution for what IMHO are their main 4 problems:
1 - One URL, One page. In order to direct a friend to a specific product in a flash site you have to tell him things like: Go to this URL, then click products, then click the shoes number X. OK, this may be a development problem but they could make it very easy.
2 - Open links in new tabs/windows. This one is really annoying.
3 - Content indexing. It is currently possible, but yet more attention is drawn to a normal HTML page than to a flash site.
4 - Ability to copy/paste the text you are reading. This one is really a development problem but again, it can be made simpler.
web architects (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally ... (Score:3, Funny)
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it organizes the content well
Are you kidding?
I'm serious--are you joking? There is almost NO hierarchy. All the data, and there's a lot of it, is basically on one or two visual layers. It's impossible to get an instant snapshot of the available content sections because the section headers scroll off ("below the fold"), and there's no top level navigation. Section headings are the same size as the body type, so I can't easily discern where sections begin and end (he could have just used separate divs for each section, so there'd