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actionscripted | 7 years ago
1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.
2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.
If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.
Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do.
Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.
nine_k|7 years ago
For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.
Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.
But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.
Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.
Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.
cabalamat|7 years ago
What happens, when, in the words of the article, you "Do not be constrained by questions of usability, legibility, and flexibility"?
The answer, it appears, is their re-design of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ which I find unusable.
mrob|7 years ago
Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
blancheneige|7 years ago
I think you can even go back as far as 1000 years to find those same standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule
dingaling|7 years ago
justrebooted|7 years ago
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r00dY|7 years ago
True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.
Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.
This led to further simplifications...
... and then Medium looks like Medium.
There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.
omg_ketchup|7 years ago
Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.
Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.
That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
rantanplan|7 years ago
The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.
jstanley|7 years ago
My experience of flash is that it mostly didn't work, and I had to spend an hour after every new OS install trying to get flash to work.
And copy and paste doesn't work, you can't right click to save images, etc. Unless you're trying to make an animation, or a game, flash gives a really lame user experience, I don't know why you like it so much.
robomartin|7 years ago
At the end of the day a site is there to serve a purpose. And, generally speaking, that demands familiarity with the UI and ease of use. If every site demanded increased cognitive load from the user the internet would be a horrible place.
I get that designers want to design cool stuff. Love it. But when all the smoke and bull clears out the mission is to sell a widget, deliver a service or provide information. Craigslist and good black and white movies prove that good and useful content is what people are after, not award-winning design and cool web tricks.
acheron|7 years ago
tokyodude|7 years ago
I googled "cool websites" and these came up
https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design...
don't know if any of those do anything for you. I'm too lazy to look for more but I feel like they are out there.
Animats|7 years ago
(Giving page designers total control over scrolling was a huge mistake.)
zeveb|7 years ago
The thing is, all that's been replaced with JavaScript, which has all the downsides (well, it's not really proprietary, but JavaScript-heavy websites aren't really usable as something to learn from & modify, especially once minification comes into play) and has the great new flaw of not realistically being disablable, unlike Flash tended to be.
We even saw this week Google deciding not to support non-JavaScript browsers.
JavaScript is a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
tomcooks|7 years ago
EH?
captn3m0|7 years ago
blablabla123|7 years ago
[deleted]
magduf|7 years ago
Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.
rpeden|7 years ago
There's a decent amount of research that has found that putting things in non-standard locations impairs most users' ability to accomplish what they want on your website.
The Nielsen Norman Group is a decent place to find some of this research. There's some decent information here about how conventional layouts tend to be more effective:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-...
and how placing logos in the center instead of on the left often prevents users from accomplishing their goals:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/centered-logos/
and the reason all of this matters is that the computer skills of a typical person using your website are probably far, far worse than you think they are:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
so if you deviate from the "standard" layout too much, you'll hurt your website's business value because people won't be able to use it effectively.
I think there's still lots of room for creativity within a standard layout. But too much creativity might result in a site that looks better from an aesthetic standpoint but is less effective at actually delivering business value.
pintxo|7 years ago
You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ...
> Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
GDPR cookie settings? Imprint? Privacy statements?
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have.
> Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations.
Sorry ;-)
lotyrin|7 years ago
Similarly, any user experience study of a website isn't going to find that you should make your menu some diagonal shimmering nonsense, or try to convey information on the side of a spinning cube or any of that sort of thing.
zbtaylor1|7 years ago
ken|7 years ago
With tablets like the iPad, the monitor is the keyboard, and your arm does block your view. Maybe it is 'silly' but a whole lot of people buy and use them.
There's been lots of other laptop designs, and they seemed much less silly to me than tablets. Compaq used to put the trackball on the right side of the case (even lefties I know mouse right-handed). HP made a laptop with a little pop-out mouse, which didn't even require a surface to place it on. IBM made a keyboard wider than the case, which unfolded when the lid was opened.
Everyone I know who tried or owned these laptops loved them. Why did they die out?
Animats|7 years ago
onion2k|7 years ago
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
ASipos|7 years ago
exodust|7 years ago
That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout.
In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building".
Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.
agumonkey|7 years ago
hwillis|7 years ago
You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet.
Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings.
Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity.
> Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.
Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns.
> Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.
As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever.
Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.
Izkata|7 years ago