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Agree with your gist completely. I’ve worked in the agency world, and there’s loads of “designers” out there who come primarily from a print background and only

by flomo 11y ago

Agree with your gist completely. I’ve worked in the agency world, and there’s loads of “designers” out there who come primarily from a print background and only have a vague clue how the web medium actually functions. They often try to do something unique or interesting, but the result ends up just being weird or not at all best-practice. (“Lets put the menus on the bottom of the page. Eureka!”) Plus, the client ends up with a website that was designed to be printed out on 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I’m sure a lot of companies have gone through this experience and decided it was a massive ripoff compared to buying a $15 wordpress template and hiring a freelancer to update the content. Of course, I’ve worked with many incredible web designers as well, and it’s definitely worth it for major brands to have a good design team. But that whole middle-lower-end market is probably just disappearing.

gnarbarian 11y ago
That is definitely the most aggravating thing from both a user and developer perspective. Naive people pushing kitschy ideas caused us to have 100% flash, unlinkable and unindexable websites for quite a while and didn't really get eliminated until mobile killed flash and HTML5 CSS and JS caught up to all the glitzy crap. And we still see people trying to 'fix' the expected behavior of things like the scrollbar. Stuff like that is a huge waste of time on something that actually hurts the user experience and almost always breaks mobile or cross browser compatibility. Many of these people have the wrong goal entirely because they think visually standing out is the most important thing. In print that makes sense, because you're trying to capture their attention while they desperately try to ignore your advertisement. On a website you already have their attention because they came to your website. And here's the Key, they came to your website to accomplish something, the designer ought to be trying to help the user reach that goal as effortlessly as possible. It's a bad idea for login links and fields to be anywhere but the top right. You put the cash registers near the exit of your store, Hiding them is a bad idea. Other funny analogies: Why put those boring gender signs on the bathrooms doesn't everyone do that? It clutters up the doors and doesn't fit with our minimalist design language. Also, if we do that then they won't look like any of the other doors in our store. We want our customers to feel like they can share everything with us so we removed all the bathroom doors and partitions between toilets. It'll even save you material costs! Wheelchair access ramps are ugly, we don't need them. I think an escalator should speed up and slow down depending on how fast someone is walking up. (scrollbar overrides) I think having signs that announce the products in a particular isle makes the store too cluttered and busy, If we make them wander around aimlessly for the product they are looking for they will see more of our store and end up buying things they otherwise wouldn't have. Just to clarify, I think standing out is great but not when it comes at the cost of usability.

by flomo 11y ago

gnarbarian 11y ago

That is definitely the most aggravating thing from both a user and developer perspective. Naive people pushing kitschy ideas caused us to have 100% flash, unlinkable and unindexable websites for quite a while and didn't really get eliminated until mobile killed flash and HTML5 CSS and JS caught up to all the glitzy crap. And we still see people trying to 'fix' the expected behavior of things like the scrollbar. Stuff like that is a huge waste of time on something that actually hurts the user experience and almost always breaks mobile or cross browser compatibility. Many of these people have the wrong goal entirely because they think visually standing out is the most important thing. In print that makes sense, because you're trying to capture their attention while they desperately try to ignore your advertisement. On a website you already have their attention because they came to your website. And here's the Key, they came to your website to accomplish something, the designer ought to be trying to help the user reach that goal as effortlessly as possible. It's a bad idea for login links and fields to be anywhere but the top right. You put the cash registers near the exit of your store, Hiding them is a bad idea. Other funny analogies: Why put those boring gender signs on the bathrooms doesn't everyone do that? It clutters up the doors and doesn't fit with our minimalist design language. Also, if we do that then they won't look like any of the other doors in our store. We want our customers to feel like they can share everything with us so we removed all the bathroom doors and partitions between toilets. It'll even save you material costs! Wheelchair access ramps are ugly, we don't need them. I think an escalator should speed up and slow down depending on how fast someone is walking up. (scrollbar overrides) I think having signs that announce the products in a particular isle makes the store too cluttered and busy, If we make them wander around aimlessly for the product they are looking for they will see more of our store and end up buying things they otherwise wouldn't have. Just to clarify, I think standing out is great but not when it comes at the cost of usability.