Web 2.0 Distracts from Good Design

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."

Old fashioned

I stick to html, since everyone can read it (mostly). And I hand code it, since most of the editors seem to make a real mess of the code, and sometimes I want to change it. Anyone else this old fashioned ?

Re:Old fashioned

Really? Thats considered old fashion? I figured everyone these 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.

Re:Old fashioned

Dreamweaver wouldn't be so popular if everyone took this sensible route. I once had to unscrew about 15 pages created by Dreamweaver and Fireworks. It took forever - each page, despite coming from the same "template" was messed up in its own unique way.

Re:Old fashioned

The point is, is that they don't want to make it possible. By making the resulting html not human readable, they lock you into using their application to edit it. So once you have hundreds of pages developed in dreamweaver, it's very hard to move away from using dreamweaver.

Re:Old fashioned

Don't discount Dreamweaver. It's editor is absolutely top-knotch.

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.

Re:Old fashioned

Agreed. Don't use Dreamweaver-specific features like templates, and never use the WYSIWYG editor. As an overall environment without all this extra crap, it's top-notch. A pretty decent editor with correct hints for HTML, CSS, and PHP, and proper project management that actually expects you to work on files locally, test on a testing server, and then publish to a production server. It's odd how many other packages can't get this right when it's such a painfully simple concept.

Re:Old fashioned

Anyone else this old fashioned ?

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.

All good things in moderation.

Web 2.0 doubly so.

Seriously, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Also,

it's got a stupid name.

Some explain this to me?

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".

What does Web 2.0 have to do with people neglecting the basics of good design? As far as I can tell they have always done that.

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."

Hmmmm "glossy but useless" ? Is the author talking about all these 'news' sites that are dripping with advertisements interspersed with only a small to modest amount of content? The web sites of today are looking more and more like magazines of yesterday; >60% advertisements and 30% content, where the difference is filled with trying to find the table of contents or the 2nd and 3rd parts of the story buried deeply in the magazine with incorrect page number links to them.

Re:Some explain this to me?

This is some BBC guy, their version of good design probably = "Flash and shinny buttons with special effects and blinking links". I actually prefer the basic and simple looks of a basic MoinMoin wiki or a simple blog -- the less flash and crap the better, just the information.

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.

Re:Some explain this to me?

Despite the constant references to him and his ideas, I think Nielsen is highly overrated. I agree that unnecessary graphic elements can get in the way of your message, but his solution is usually to remove *all* graphic elements and stick with plain dark text on a light background. Good design is about conveying an idea or information cleanly and clearly, and often "making it look pretty" can go a long way toward that goal. More often than not, "usability" seems to just mean "get rid of the images."

Re:Some explain this to me?

What does Web 2.0 have to do with people neglecting the basics of good design? As far as I can tell they have always done that.

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.

I'm to s3cks1 f0r my3

You mean I could no longer get a job [infiltrated.net] with my pimped geocities/xoom/fortunecity skills?

Yep.

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.

That was precisely my thought when I saw, side-by-side, the proposed look for a new W2 site vs. our current bland but functional site.

Actually, I thought our current one *looked* better too.

Management 'distracts good design'

Of all of the best practices that I've learned as a designer analyst over time, I've come to realize that management (with a bug in their collective bonnets about some new-fangled technology), do a better job of screwing up design and usability than the technology itself.

drop shadows and mouse hovers

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.

Gah...new to actually using /.

How can I be the first to tag this as "Duh"?

Hype and more hype

I'll grant at any time that usability is the number one priority. But this kind of "backlash" *against* Web 2.0 technologies is misguided, and a kind of hype in itself. Technologies are tools--they can be used to good or bad effect, and you can't generalize about the tool by the sites that happen to use it.

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 restrained by a protocol that was NEVER intended to be used like an application! I swear, I'll never understand why people get all up in arms about technologies that make the web EASIER to use!

This appears to me to be the same kind of argument as "Style vs. Substance! Style is bad, mkay?" Yet in this case it's not even about style, but about tools that enable a far bigger range of usability than previously. What gives?

Jacon Nielsen

Hmm, hmm... So teaching us design, Jacob Nielsen [useit.com] wants. How embarassing, how embarassing.

He says this as if it's something new.

Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said.

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 development, they usually mess it up. Visually it may look right, but usability-wise it's just plain wrong. "Web 2.0 features" are just one more thing for design firms not to understand.

Now, if I can back up for a moment, I'd like to say that this situation is perfectly understandable. Website design firms are mainly staffed by artists rather than technologists. They may have skills enough to use off-the-shelf libraries to add whatever feature you're looking for, but they're not going to know how to properly implement a technology solution. That's why the world has Computer Science/Engineering majors.

The best solution is to develop a strong relationship with a specific design firm, then get them to ship only the mockups and assets used. Have the implementation of the mockups done by in-house programmers or trusted consultants. (I can't stress the "trusted" part enough here.) If the implementors find something that doesn't make sense visually, then they can send it back until the web design firm gets a feel for what is needed.

Together, these two teams will produce a far better website than either could have done independently. It may cost a bit more in the short term, but the result will cost you a lot less in maintenance in the long-term. Furthermore, the teamwork you develop between these teams will give your company a powerful source for website changes and improvements.

What I find...

What I found, first when most of the literate people here split for Multiply, again when I was offered a moderator spot on another 2.0'ish site, and with other sites since, is that there's now an asumption that users are already familiar with all the generic functionality of delic.io.ous, Flickr, Digg and the rest. No one ever explains how to use "tags" or stuff like that -- it's as taken for granted as clicking on hyperlinks.

The makers seem either unaware of or uninterested in users who aren't already knee-deep in their competitors.

Pssh.

Sure, blame Web 2.0 for your horribly designed web pages.

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

A shining example of how to totally screwup what was once a useful best-in-class site: http://yodel.yahoo.com/2006/11/28/anything-good-on -tonight/ [yahoo.com]

And now my bank is going down the same road with their online bill payment tool. *sigh*.

Since when?

As if, web pages of "good design" were actually common before "Web 2.0".

Web 2.0 == Flash?

Sounds like Web 2.0 is just like Flash.

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...

After all, web 2.0 helps me to design rich-client synergies, disintermediate semantic networking and, of course, let's not forget it can assist in syndicating standards-compliant widgets*. Try doing all that on your web 1.0, gramps!

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?

I've seen two definitions of Web2.0: user-contributed contents, and the use of AJAX/DHTML.

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

I use a bunch of Firefox plugins to improve my browsing experience... but I recently was stuck using a computer with only IE. I had totally forgotten how many sites were obnoxious. I don't mind some reasonable advertising, but sites seem to be increasing the percent of the screen given to annoying animated/Flash ads, huge colourful ads in the middle of the article, etc.

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...

Although people in their late 30s make very different use of the web to those in their teens, Mr Nielsen expects that when those teenagers grow up the time they spend online will diminish.

Yeah...
Just like our parents' generation grew up to watch less television.

Nielsen a sellout

Nielsen is a sellout and has no credibility. Shortly after releasing his "Flash is 99% bad" work, Nielsen took money from Macromedia, and suddenly it's not so bad:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html [useit.com]

Usability includes being able to access the content without using proprietary software, Jakob!

Why is the BBC posting this now

What I don't understand is why the BBC is posting this now. Did Neilsen just speak somewhere?

It's the same story he's been telling all along - so what makes it news? Why now?

Extrapolating from too few examples

MySpace is a horribly badly designed mess, but that doesn't mean all web 2.0 sites will be. Take a look at Trig.com (you could even listen to my geeky music there [trig.com] if you feel like it).

Their business model is basically 'Myspace but not a horribly designed mess'. I'm sure there's also someone out there building 'Youtube with buffering and no comment spam', 'slashdot with editors' and so on.

MySpace is the AOL of Web 2.0 - It got big early on, but it's not going to be long before people realise it's been left behind.

Web 2.1 anyone?

Technology Not Equal To Good Design

This confirms something I've always thought true, especially when I first saw CSS come out (although mostly with CSS 2.0, the much more troublesome incarnation). New technologies, whether it be AJAX (which is becoming known for being insecure), CSS, or even HTML when it first came out, do not equal instant good design. Even now, users of HTML, arguably one of the oldest markup languages on the internet (or the oldest most used markup), still utilize what have become poor features, notably the marquee tag (interestingly implemented by Internet Explorer), and some consider tables a remanent (although arguably still useful tag) since CSS came along. Web design has always been, IMO, about compromises: compromise for what you want to do for what you can do, for what you want and what works, for what's ambitious to what's practical. Just because you have that bomb, doesn't mean you have to blow something up. This why only recently have i considered learning more beyond HTML and CSS (the later which I'm still learning to get a fluent grasp on without consulting tutorials every 5 mins). Again, IMO, I would point out that PHP is probably the only technology of Web 2.0 that has proved more useful than troublesome, which is why I plan on learning it whenever I stop stalling and actually take an intro to programming course I regretfully choose not to take in high school in favor of "learning" Word for an entire semester >_>. It's not all hopeless though; part of the fallout of this whole Web 2.0 business is that the new technologies will eventually be learned enough to utilize more specifically instead of riding a popularity wave. It's all really silly when most changes happen gradually; it's just the same game as whatever Web 1.0 was with different cards and different players.

Adaptive Radiation

Sounds like classic biological adaptive radiation [wikipedia.org].

Basically, a new way of doing this comes into being, and suddenly there is an 'explosion' of examples of that pattern in use for all kinds of different and often unrelated goals.

The example I learned about in university was the explosion of hominids after bipedalism was evolved. Suddenly, the African savannah was inundated with all these new weird and wonderful bipedal apes walking around taking benefits of the advantages afforded by bipedalism. Eventually, all but one of them (Homo sapiens) die out through direct or indirect competition.

Coming back to web 2.0 - a new way of doing things comes to light (i.e. AJAX), and people use it for myriad different applications. Those applications that actually deliver the goods stay and evolve and those that don't deliver are weeded out by market forces (natural selection).

Gods, I miss being a student and learning this more-or-less useless stuff...

Working with vendors...

Useability isn't just about the consumer, the website has to make money and it really helps to have a less spartan design for more revenue opportunities. It's about balance and I can't fault sites for looking out for themselves at the expense of the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.

ANYTHING new and hyped....

There is a certain kind of designer that doesn't care about good design, but does care about anything that's new and "exiting" enough to generate buzzwords. There is another kind of designer that cares about good design and comes to new technology more thoughtfully.

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.

The philosophy of the Nielsen Norman Group...

http://www.nngroup.com/about/ [nngroup.com]

Good design is good design is good design

People always ask me what I think of new technology fads. I usually tell them to focus on concrete requirements and if they are doing it themselves, good engineering. The rest will take care of itself.

The more I look into people's definitions of Web 2.0, the more I am convinced that it is just Web 1.0 plus hype. There is absolutely nothing new here-- online community pages have been up for a long time. And any site that wants to make it on the internet has *always* had to build a community of users around the site. Sure we have a few more tools here (like AJAX) but these are only tools.

If you focus on making your site useful first, focus on giving people reasons to come back, and focus on accessibility in general, the rest will take care of itself.

Unfortunately this is a minority view (not here, but in the real world)...

Adobe Exchange was destroyed by Flash

After Adobe bought Macromedia, the Macromedia guys took the Adobe Exchange, a fast and functional html site devoted to plugins and extensions, and rewrote it to work in flash. Now, it's slow, impossible to navigate, scrolling is disabled, the 'back' button is broken, it won't let the user determine font size, and searches are slow and not relevant. That's just a few of the problems...

They've effectively locked new and old users out, and repeated pleas to bring back the old site have gone unheeded and the issues with the new site have been ignored. Where there was once a thriving community of third party additions, now there is a stagnant pool, as uploads have trickled to nothing.

Way to go Adobe - you've just killed your golden goose. Stop [adobeforums.com] the madness [adobeforums.com] of flash for flash's sake! (Don't be surprised if these links don't load, evidently Adobe purchased Fark's old servers.)

"Web 2.0" redesigns bad, async uses better

Tribe.net [tribe.net] redesigned their home page to use "Web 2.0" around the beginning of 2007. Now users could drag the various boxes around, rearrange the home page, and choose which elements they wanted. (Except for the ads, of course, which were immovable.) The main effect was that "Tribe.net bug reports" became one of the most active groups. Tribe's traffic ratings in Alexa continued to slide.

There are uses for the asynchrony of XMLHttpRequest, though. Try our search and rating box. [sitetruth.com] We have a site rating engine which rates sites on demand, and it takes takes about 8 to 30 seconds for sites it hasn't looked at yet. We needed a way to present this to the user without stalling the user's browsing.

So we needed a truly asynchronous web page, and we have one. When you enter text into the box and click the big "Search" button, the site gets all the results it can get from the databases immediately, and updates the page. The sites for which ratings aren't yet available show as rotating "busy" icons, which are replaced over the next few seconds as the server reads the target web site, rates it, and sends the ratings back to the browser.

If we did this with stock HTML, the whole thing would feel so sluggish as to be useless. But with a dynamic page, the user gets useful results immediately, which improve over the next 8 to 30 seconds. The user's browsing isn't stalled. In fact, if you enter something new into the search box while updates are in progress, outstanding XMLHttpRequest requests are aborted, and you can do a new search without waiting for old ratings to complete.

Few "Web 2.0" sites seem to support as much asynchrony. Google Maps is probably the best known site that really is asynchronous in a useful way.

Moving Target

I think the problem with Nielsen's argument is that what he considers the "basics" have changed over the last 10 years. As an anal graphic designer AND a huge MySpace fan, all this complaining about usability (or lack of) is just "old design" snobbery. Eventually people have to wake up and realize that just because it's ugly doesn't mean it's diffucult or 'not fun' to use.

Bottom line is that MySpace, to my knowledge, is the ONLY "web 2.0" site that allows (hacky) CSS and HTML to be manipulated by users at all levels. People who, 3 years ago, could barely turn a computer on are now blogging, posting pictures, e-mailing (albeit through the MySpace messaging service), and learning to write hypertext tags, specifically because of MySpace.

IMHO, in the "new" consumer-based web, the functionality IS the design, and it is NOT useless.

There is no future for "web 2.0"

And theres a total simple reason for that - the need to ensure content is delivered to the other side.

previously it was low bandwidth and specs of computers that prevented the bells and whistles of the kind in this "2.0" being put on websites/services - the visitor's bw and computer wouldnt been able to handle all the load, so they were very scarcely used.

now there is bandwidth. there is processing power. one would think that thing is solved now, and anyone could go on using cool widgets and whatnot in their sites.

on the contrary.

in the last 15 years, everything became more complicated. not only the number of programs that are installed on any computer and their diversity increased, but we also now have :

- Menacing viruses, trojans
- Hellish spam
- Valid privacy concerns ranging from simple cookie usage to self-installing toolbars and more
- Phishing, credit card fraud/stealing stuff
- Cross site scripting and other remote exploits

Some of these directly affect '2.0' stuff, some of them affect it combined with others.

To battle these, we have firewalls, anti-virus, trojan programs, privacy programs, all-in-ones, more and more os settings towards security, browser measures towards security and stuff.

So theres an increasingly complex environment being created in clients' computers with each passing year. To deliver any content, you have to pass through all these obstacles, and with any increasing amount of client-side running elements (javascript, activex and more) you introduce to this equation the lower your chances of getting to client gets.

and even when you reach the clients' screen, there is the problem of whether your content is being displayed as you want it to, or twisted due to interference from any "Security" and/or os stuff.

On the other hand of the spectrum, NO clients' computer refuses plain text data coming from a website.

So best bet for a website to reach the clients assuredly is to go for css, html and images in rendering the webpage that is prepared server-side, and then send it to client.

For anything on web, reach is of paramount importance. The less people you can reach due to ANYTHING, be it security concerns or low system specs, you lose business/exposure.

some sites and establishments can afford it. they are big. it wouldnt change much if they lost 5% of their visitors who utilize a site that brings the establishment, like, $2-3 income per visitor. that would still be a considerable amount if you ask accountants and economists, but, technology wise such an establishment can make this sacrifice for the sake of "coolness", which will be an investment in terms of popularity.

but, small sites and establishments, which constitute majority of the web can not afford this.

a small estore might be getting 1000 unique visitors a day, and it is probable that one of the lost 5%, 50 people, would place an order for thousands of dollars. same goes for consultancy companies, businesses and such, which do deals of tens of thousands of dollars with one source. for content sites that are just building up, losing 50 people a day might mean that they would be losing maybe 4-5 people who might be major contributors to site content.

so, web 2.0 MIGHT be an acceptable hype for big boys for now. Catch the emphasis here - FOR NOW.

it is DEFINITE that as the number of sites using client-side stuff increase, anti virus and security software will be forced to adapt to allow them. and the more stuff allowed to run client side, there will be more channels for hackers, trojaners, virus spreaders to exploit. hacking is one thing, but exploiting through already permitted channels is some other thing. you can do major stuff if you can get a channel to a client's computer that way. possibilities are endless.

so, for now hype around "2.0" might be continuing, but, sooner or later we will see the security side of the issue coming up on

Peronsalisaton?

From TFA: "He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom."

Eh? Since when was personalisation a feature of Web 2.0? Surely that's a feature of the bad old days of Broadvision and all that crap. I can't think of any recent sites that focus on personalisation. In fact quite the opposite: it's all about being part of the crowd.

Google Groups 2.0ed-up

Google Groups (usenet) is an example of misuse of Web 2.0. Before that it had a pretty good HTML-based approach. Then they Ajaxified it, and it is clunky and jittery. It is hard to know whether a mouse-stroke "took" or not, and sometimes it resizes wrong. It just feels "unnatural".

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

I'm against entirely Flash-made sites. Not even Macromedia has a full site made in Flash, they use it only for the menu and landing-page banners. They don't put content you need to read in there.

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

It used to be that an art director would build the design for websites, but with dynamic and active websites (Web2.0 if, we need to use that word), a web architect is the new boss needed to run the show. That is, someone who understands template-based programming and information workflow enough to develop a solid basis for the designers to take over and make things look pretty. Oh yeah, and this person should also be able to direct the programmers to organize things in a useful manner for the designers as well. Until companies catch on and begin hiring website directors with these qualifications, they'll just continue to roll out that static, oh so pretty and dumb sites that they always have been.

No duh...

I mean most of the features I've seen in the so-called Web 2.0 hype tend to be very hard to conceive in respect to that they're really not integrated well. I mean even AJAX has seriously flaws anyone can exploit (most hinging on injection of malicious code) with very little understanding of it. So, this is why I think it's best to minimize its use and just focus on more realistic interfaces online. If you need to get something done on your bank account, then use something that is relatively secure, where you can set some sort of permissions on it, but AJAX isn't it. That's why I'm quite glad my bank doesn't use this web 2.0 junk, seriously.

-- Brede

Personally ...

... I welcome our impending Web 3.0 overlords.

I totally disagree with Jacob Nielsen

I was completely shocked to read such an article at the BBC site, Mr. Jacob Nielsen, known as the usability guru has something to say on web2.0 and design.

Below are my answer to each of his statements mentioned, one can read the blog at http://hiteshmehta.in/?p=8 [hiteshmehta.in] for details.

Today, the dynamic web pages are not made in any rush hour, plenty of man hours goes in to research and a lot of effort is being put in by the group of experts to make the NEXT web2.0 product / web site totally user-friendly and easy going with the millions of users on the web.

Experts from various streams like research analyst, hardcore technical guys, business development managers, investors, Artificial Intelligence experts, SEO specialists and many others are today extremely involved in making a successful web2.0 product.

Web2.0 does not start or end with Glossy sites. Making your web2.0 powered website does not require any glossy buttons and interface. The designers today should not confuse themselves by looking at the web2.0 sites and feeling that adding a gloss button would categorize their website under web2.0.

Personalization tool, in fact this is what the USP of any web2.0 site is, how effectively you get your information and fantastic use of technology from your desktop. Everything is served to you with just a click and some amount of customization makes your life easier. Earlier for various information you need to go to various website and collect/read data.

One of the finest example of web2.0 'personalization tool' is NetVibes.com and without neglecting the good design and usability. I have been using netvibes.com right from the beginning. Every minute I get fresh news, fresh feeds from the dozens of sites I subscribed at netvibes. This is simply amazing and is getting better and better everyday.

A site, which is easy to use, good search tools, text free jargon, usability and lots more. I vote DIGG.com at this point. A highly used website by millions of users which is so good to use and you don't have to actually search for anything latest but it gives you the information which is most active, most voted and widely discussed with the registered members. On the usability side they are genius and one can understand this well only after registering with digg.com and using it.

The primary things of today's web users is to get the solution, solution which is feasible, accurate, master solution and all this is possible today just by dynamic web pages, community based sites, user generated tools, wherein everybody can be part of this and is well moderated by the owners of web2.0 sites. We just need to look at what we need first and what is more important to us. Nobody here is criticizing with the evolution of web2.0; everyone likes it, learning it and will be using it.

Talking about demographics and statistics, people who contributes, occasionally contributes and never contributes does not matter at all. If 90% of users do not contribute, they gather the information for which they go online and look out for sites, which provides useful and efficient information. The number of users are growing enormously everyday and making the web2.0 work for them. Most people get in, get in and get out only after they have found a solution. People are getting in every second at web2.0 sites, which are made popular by other users.

Come on! Let us be more practical today, people still talking about web2.0 failure and criticizing on this is not and will never make a difference. A lot of people are already talking about web3.0 today. If one has to wait and wait until someone comes and spoon-feeds you about what exactly web2.0 is then...? I don't have anything more to say.

To conclude:

Is Web 2.0 'neglecting good design'? ABSOLUTELY NOT AND I TOTALLY DISAGREE WITH MR.JACOB NIELSEN.
Web2.0 actually gives the designers a new platform, a new challenge and opportunity by producing the best product/websit