35 ms·

Why do all websites look the same?

269 points by guzik 8y ago

guzik 8y ago
Here's the concept of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ if someone missed it
- V-2 8y ago
  Not to sound mean, but I'd prefer all websites looking generic (as uninventive as it might be), if this is supposed to represent the alternative.
  - guzik 8y ago
    I am not the author, but I do agree.
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago
  This is completely unusable -is it supposed to be a parody?
  - ardy42 8y ago
    It's the 4th example in the article. Superimposing the text of one comment over another may look cool, but doing so means you gave no thought to the experience of the user.
  - laurent123456 8y ago
    I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  This looks awesome, but it's completely unusable.
- mcv 8y ago
  What the fuck is that? It certainly looks cool, but I have no idea what it is, what it's for, or how to use it. Being usable and looking really cool often don't go together very well. I suppose the few cases where they do, are the mark of a truly great designer.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  I'm surprised he even categorized HN as looking the same. This place is very streamlined compared to other news aggregator type sites, even pre-redesign Reddit.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - rchaud 8y ago
    HN is basically a vBulletin forum from 15 years ago with less functionality. Metafilter and Slashdot are similar and their looks haven't changed much since they started. The HN Redesign probably happened because the API was easy to use by students and they wanted to experiment with "cyberpunk" style interface, for which a text heavy site like HN was perfeect. It isn't at all the type of site
- jim_bailie 8y ago
  Nice, but too cool
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Bluecobra 8y ago
  I think HK has one of the best (if not the best) design of any news aggregator sites out there. It’s perfect and I hope it doesn’t ever change. I can’t think of many websites that scale so well from a mobile phone to a desktop computer.
- CM30 8y ago
  Which itself is a perfect showcase for why most sites look the same. That redesign is virtually unusable, and goes so far into being 'art' that it just doesn't work as a discussion forum. Still, maybe it's more the article writer's concepts of a unique website that don't work more than all sites being the same being a bad thing. Their redesign for Medium.com is nearly as unusable too: https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism I get the creativity in letting people adjust the length of words/negativity of words/number of most common words in an article, but like the Hacker News redesign, it just creates an unreadable mess. You can make something different without making it unusable, and most of these redesigns fail miserably at that.
- magduf 8y ago
  This is very impressive from a technical perspective, but for actual using it, it's truly horrible. I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.
LitFan 8y ago
All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around. This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on). From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects of them) get blended with the standard.
- cnasc 8y ago
  > All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around. Yes. This is quite similar to asking why all newspapers look the same.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    One of them is pink. It's quite distinctive, but has not spawned a flock of imitators in blue, yellow, etc. The USA Today was the first to use color in the masthead (and on every daily paper's front page), and that has been copied by some.
    - adventured 8y ago
      Attribute improvements are adopted when they make broad sense (including economic). The same with color television, or improvements in book printing quality. Comprehensive macro changes usually only occur when there is a rather extreme inflection point in technology that makes a true leap possible. Something that was previously impossible not only becomes possible, but makes the experience a lot better for the end user. That's why the iPhone approach murdered the old flip phone industry so rapidly, that technology inflection made a lot of new things possible that were very beneficial / desirable to end users. It justified a large macro change, which users had to adjust to.
- amelius 8y ago
  I don't think this is true. I think designs get copied from websites which are successful (in all ways, not just design), because people have positive feelings with those designs, and also because using them requires a learning effort. It doesn't mean, however, that the designs themselves are best.
pssflops 8y ago
I can't think of another website that even remotely resembles superbad [0] and that's quite okay with me. [0]: http://superbad.com http://superbad.com
deanCommie 8y ago
Websites are not art* They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi-directionally. Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art. In all cases functionality is most important - which is not incompatible with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too. But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay. As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well. * Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well. I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design fads and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier" than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the most effective or functional for the particular use-case.
- ken 8y ago
  > Websites are not art* They are communication mediums. I'm not sure what you think "art" is, but art is communication. That's the whole point. That's all it is. As the article (mis-)quotes, "Don't mistake legibility for communication." Writing a text-only webpage isn't somehow opting out of art, any more than a brutalist building is opting out of architecture.
- blue4 8y ago
  I would tend to agree on those points but I also want to believe that websites are an art form. While content strategy and user experience are now in a pre-thought context rather than an after thought, it obviously is about displaying something useful. But it almost stagnates new ideas from coming to the forefront it leads to us all getting swept into the game of 'creating the same layout,' all sites become a boring shell with different words.
- exodust 8y ago
  Why is everyone comparing websites with physical objects like cars, phones, laptops, and buildings? As soon as you do that, you've broken whatever conclusion you put forward next... "...and because of the way cement is poured into the foundations of modern office buildings, that's why everyone is using the same website template". Sorry, but you'll need to try a lot harder with your analogies.
malvosenior 8y ago
There's some irony to having this posted on Medium which is about the most generic looking site on the internet.
- mcv 8y ago
  My thought exactly, even when I clicked on the link. I think publishing this in Medium rather than on one of those designs of their students, kinda proves why most websites prefer to look boring.
- grvdrm 8y ago
  Indeed -- made it hard to read the actual article knowing it was posted on Medium
shshhdhs 8y ago
None of these “redesigned web” examples are balanced or readable. While I’m not convinced today’s design is the most optimal, I’d prefer them over any of these futuristic examples
tvanantwerp 8y ago
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html
- mcv 8y ago
  By that logic, all websites should look like Facebook.
  - athenot 8y ago
    Most platforms already do.
  - ntumlin 8y ago
    I'm not sure that's wrong. Look at the (temporary) outrage whenever Facebook does a redesign, even Facebook is allowed to not look like Facebook.
    - stepvhen 8y ago
      FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely. A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed. So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.
      - Izkata 8y ago
        > they always added and pushed some functionality Most of the outrage I remember was around hiding and removing functionality: Chronological newsfeed, page customizations, network pages, etc
mcv 8y ago
I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the same. Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar. Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations, nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at transferring the content, the story, to your head. Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A design that distracts from the content is not practical.
- sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
  Geocities and MySpace comes to mind when seeing the redesigns. Websites needed some type of convention for the average user to feel comfortable using.
  - Semiapies 8y ago
    The designs offered really remind me more of graphic designers' websites from the 1990s—confusing, impenetrable, but vaguely artsy. Some people need to be reminded that design is not just being artsy. Design is for accomplishing purpose beyond screenshots to put on one's portfolio.
- nindalf 8y ago
  Like Hacker News. Most of us are on this website right now via the browser. It's the same interface it's been for years, and that familiarity increases the efficiency of understanding. Re-imaginging everything is a great opportunity for designers to showcase their skills, but wouldn't really improve users' efficiency.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
TylerH 8y ago
In the past: holy grail layout Now: masonry layout / infinite scrolling
chippy 8y ago
I think it's because web design used to be a branch of graphic design, and now it's not - it's now a branch of web development. Designs for websites were made in photoshop by creatives. Now designs for websites are made by front end engineers, or UX consultants.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Exactly. Making an artistic and unique website is simply too expensive. Think of all the lost revenue. Web design has become a science of analytics crunching, conversion optimization and retention. The author seems to show total ignorance for human pattern recognition.
pcarolan 8y ago
I think he left SEO as a reason out of this article. We're now building websites as much for humans as for google crawlers to read them, which means meeting standards of accordance in order to even participate in the SEO game. H1, H2, H3 tags, layout, and content headers don't have to look the same or be layed out or structured the same, but many sites have deviated from these formats at their own peril only to return to the warm embrace of conformity. Not to mention that Amp is basically a design standard as much as a content standard.
dgdg 8y ago
Because of Bootstrap. Everyone uses it. Every old website that looked different in the past, now does a UI refresh (by just using Bootstrap out of the box with minimal customisation) and becomes another one of those the same looking websites.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Outside of the HN comment bubble, nobody uses Bootstrap. And it doesn't explain the examples in TFA.
  - david-cako 8y ago
    Speaking anecdotally, up to around 2016 every other website used Bootstrap or Foundation, often with minimal customization, just because it looks and works well out of the box on all devices. Now it seems like it's getting better, but generic UI components are an extremely relevant aspect. Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me "it's about the functionality, not the design". https://promethease.com/ https://promethease.com/ Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.
Konryan 8y ago
Those examples make me very, very glad all the websites 'look the same'.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  Indeed. The web is more consistent than its ever been, and I think that's a very good thing - it means that I'm not often surprised when I scroll down and the page moves to the right (I'm looking at you, Apple...)
iambateman 8y ago
Turns out, 95% of the Internet is used for practical purposes, and certain best practices arise...a balance between the content and the ads. The other 5% is a self-expressive art project. Part of me wonders if the author is trolling everyone by writing an article about the need for more unique design on Medium.com.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  This person takes the time to write an infuriating rant but can’t take the time to understand human pattern recognition, the reason why the web is the way it is.
- croisillon 8y ago
  reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995
cortexio 8y ago
Why do all roads look the same? Cry me a river
actionscripted 8y ago
Also: 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.
- magduf 8y ago
  You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts. 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.
lostgame 8y ago
The answer to this as of the last 5-10 years seems to be to simply be 'responsive design'. Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design pattern at this point.
Deinos 8y ago
Donald Norman does a good job explaining why in The Design of Everyday Things. I am sure most of you have probably read it, but if you haven't... https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...
chuckgreenman 8y ago
> David Carson once said, “don’t confuse communication with legibility.” We should apply this advice to the current state of web design. Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list. Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds. I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.
- SippinLean 8y ago
  Carson was saying that as a rejection of minimalism. It was an embrace of experimental graphic design. He was specifically saying that "efficiency and the ability to be understood" were not always the most important factors in a design.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Off topic but these days I load every website in reader view. It’s amazing how annoying custom fonts, sizes and colors become once you get used to reader view for everything. Doesn’t matter what font, font size, color or layout you use - I won’t see it and I love it.
- satori99 8y ago
  I do this too. I scan the first paragraph or two and if I decide it is worth reading, I hit the reader button. I really couldn't care less about modern web design -- Just show me the text.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    You can set every page to open in reader view automatically by pressing and holding that icon I think.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Modern design is just so tiring. A wide range of font sizes from tiny to huge, impossible contrast ratios, font choices that stain the mind, media that distracts from the message - all add up to tiring me out mentally.
jonathanmarcus 8y ago
"Generic fonts" The web had ~ 5 system fonts before Web Fonts were available in 2008 / 2009. Now the web has many thousands of the best fonts ever created by the world's best foundries.
- cronix 8y ago
  Yes, another "cool" thing slowing down loading/rendering the site. "Waiting for fonts.googleapis.com"...
haburka 8y ago
Ironically, this is a medium post. Why didn’t the author make their own website to demonstrate how creative they can be? The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you’re going to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front end is hard, so that’s not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.
JeanMarcS 8y ago
If the search area is not on top right, everybody will loose time looking for it. Web is not art anymore. It's mainstream. It might be sad, but well... Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design. You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them. Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ? Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ? Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt. Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas. Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.
atoav 8y ago
Because Designers don't know how to build them without using frameworks. Because Customers don't know what they need, but very much what they want.
- krapp 8y ago
  Most frameworks are built around readability and a few standard layout configurations based on the principles of magazine page design and typography. What do customers need that modern web frameworks don't provide, and why is it wrong for customers to want the web to be familiar and unobtrusive?
zallarak 8y ago
"Type Primer" was a revealing and relevant read for this topic. Design is about functionality, and good typography and alignment can often-times get you there. Colors, shapes, etc. are interesting for art; but when someone needs to use what you've built, ensuring functionality is clear is crucial.
anotheryou 8y ago
Swiss style design solved much of bad design. If you divert from that you better have a reason and be good at it or just layer something unique on top.
r00dY 8y ago
I run a front-end agency that specializes in helping top-league branding agencies and designers code their websites. Designers try to make sth fresh and out of the box all the time. The problem with these solutions are: 1. UX sucks 2. Don't scale to other resolutions (especially mobile / tablet). 3. EXTREMELY expensive to code comparing to "boring" web solutions (multipliers might be as big as 5-10x) So most of the work we do is to try to make designers think with patterns ("boring" but the only way to fit in budget) and try to get as much as they can from STATIC design. Play with typography, key visuals, content etc. This is where their work brings most value for reasonable money. The author of the article is a professor, so wouldn't expect realistic business thinking from him. He might be sad because web is boring, but usually no one wants to spend huge amount of money for prototypes where there's 95% probability that UX and stability will be worse than standard. And there's a HUGE value in familiarity for users. That's why most of "creative projects" end up looking pretty similar at the end. I've seen many e-commerce sites which had "fancy design" and after months/years ended up with standard e-comm layout. Also, web today is super hard comparing to 10 years ago. Number of things to think about multiplied by A LOT. Coding great static website with all things stable and looking great is a big task already. It's like asking for a car with steering wheel in the back or with 3 wheels and paying for it 5x more. Do you want one? EDIT: Not saying "creative projects" are bad or sth, they sometimes are super coool. But I treat them more like "web art installation". Nice if you like them but not really practical.
criddell 8y ago
Matthew Butterick wrote about this 5 years ago: https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/ https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/ Even publications that produce a beautiful paper product seem to be willing to accept a garbage design when they post it online.
blunte 8y ago
Depends on the purpose of the website. If the purpose is to convey information, then there will be quite some similarities between websites that share that purpose. If the purpose is to use the web as a medium of artistic expression, then you can see some variety. But that's likely a small percentage of websites by purpose.
deegles 8y ago
"People spend most of their time browsing other websites" Yes, it's a truism, but it explains why site designs converge. Fewer people will be willing to learn your site's custom layout and behavior.
r00dY 8y ago
"Somewhere between $20m and $100m ARR, All marketing sites converge on an identical design" https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152 https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152
jordache 8y ago
why do all cars look the same? why do all magazine covers look the same? why do all the graphics on cable news channels look the same? These are questions that do not require an article worth of words for analysis..
msla 8y ago
I'd say these re-designs are inaccessible but people would get the wrong idea; inaccessible usually means not accessible to people who have handicaps of some variety, and that doesn't accurately capture the problems with these re-designed websites: They're not accessible to anyone, anywhere, regardless of how able they are, unless they're the designer themself. They not only blindly assume you have the latest web browser technology and are willing to use it, heedless of security concerns and basic propriety, on relatively minor sites, they assume you've crawled up inside the designer's head and therefore see the site the way the designer sees it. Which brings me to why sites "All Look The Same" (kind of a stupid thing to say, but I'll not fight it): It's a design language, something where designers and users can agree which elements do what, what affordances they have, and, therefore, how to use the site to get what they want from it. None of the re-designs follow that. None of the re-designs are respectful of anyone else. These re-designs are a bad parody of design work, and make designers look bad by association.
ryu2k2 8y ago
All webdevs use the same tools that push certain directions. No webdev has the time to be creative and try out new things so they build each website the same way. Diversity is found near exclusively in the domain of homepages built by people not in the business that didn't make their website to put on a resume to proof they can use whatever tool is currently in.
alan_n 8y ago
I don't think anyone has mentioned it apart from the fact most people would find these confusing, but these types of layouts look like accessibility nightmares, and for what benefit? Making something look a bit nicer? I mean, it's fine if the main goal of the website is to be artistic, but as others have pointed out, that's not the main goal of most websites, it's communicating information.
JAdamMoore 8y ago
Because not everyone wants to solve a friggin puzzle, genius.
otras 8y ago
I also recommend the author's follow up article "Balancing Creativity and Usability" [0]. [0]: https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-usability-9bb2cd0fe929 https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-usabilit...
Kagerjay 8y ago
I still think there's a lot of subtle UX innovation going around. You just need to know where to look. Some more well known sites include: - Medium - Atlas Obscura - Techcrunch - New York Times (visual / interactive story articles) - https://baymard.com/research https://baymard.com/research - ecommerce UX research Not all UX design content mediums have been invented yet, there's billions of permutations, and different content requirements. Different color, typography, color psychology, shadows, icons, animations, etc all change the way a story is told. A website is just a content medium, much like a video or image. However, at the end of the day, content will mostly be the same. It's just CSS and JS changing the look and feel of the site. Example, one static HTML file and multiple CSS implementations: http://csszengarden.com http://csszengarden.com. To the untrained eye, every site does look the same. My definition of good UX is this - minimize the total distance your eyes have to adjust, and maximize the amount of content captured. Without being overly fatiguing (usage of whitespace, eye relief, etc).
codingdave 8y ago
Why shouldn't they look the same? They are tools. Usually for communication, and you usually want your visitors to intuitively know how to navigate your content. By all means, feel free to break conventions if you have a purpose in doing so, but for most brochure sites or information-based sites, you have no reason for such things. Quite the contrary, when I set up a site for someone, I tell them to make it match their brand, but not to get overly creative other aspects of the design. A creative design may be interesting, but is that the goal of the site? To convince the audience that you found an interesting designer? Or do you want to communicate something about your product/project? Simple, effective designs have evolved over the last couple decades. Designers should experiment, as that is their purpose, and it is how we avoid stagnation. Everyone else should use what works.
ryanisnan 8y ago
Truth be told, when a website is totally unconventional, it has my attention for a short time, generally on account of novelty. Once that has worn off, unless the site is exceedingly usable, memorable or memorable, I'm out. It's taxing to have to visually search, analyze, scaffold, and navigate a new mental model of how I expect a website to behave. And therein lies the problem, people have expectations of websites, and it is generally in their best interest to conform to existing standards.
Fnoord 8y ago
They don't look the same; you can make an argument they look similar though. "Fabian and Florian turned Hacker News into an interactive visualization. The social media site is a news aggregator, focusing on computer science and information technology. Its design is bare-bones but it has complex functionality for voting and discussions. Fabian and Florian have taken the existing structure and turned it into a typographic space of timelines and networks. The visual presentation is based on the sequence and connections of news and comments. They also connected their design to the API of Hacker News, so you can actually use it to read the site. View the redesign of Hacker News." And the redesign is a usability nightmare. You cannot easily skip a topic you're not interested in, and you cannot even skip the comments easily which are emphasized. In normal HN, you can browse news.ycombinator.com and click on the links from there. You can open the original links and the HN discussions in tabs. Not in this redesign. Perhaps it is God's greatest gift on mobile (I tried it on desktop), I don't know. Examples of doing it different should be objectively better; this one doesn't appear to be such an example, so don't mention it [1]. Instead, go back to the drawing board. [1] There's also a bug that clicking on No. and Pts. gets you to that user's hompeage. Which could be 1 or 76, but it has nothing to do with that userID.
- lasagnaphil 8y ago
  I’ve tried it on mobile. (iPhone 8) The whole thing takes more than five seconds to load, and the UI is basically unusuable. Tried clicking at an article, comment text is almost impossible to read due to the broken layout.
Yhippa 8y ago
I was going to blame Bootstrap for this but then found this on the site: https://expo.getbootstrap.com https://expo.getbootstrap.com. Some really good examples of innovative design even using good old Bootstrap.
natecavanaugh 8y ago
No, just no. I understand that to push the current state further, you need to think outside of the box, but what you call bland, I call essential to communication. I find the David Carson quote (confusing communication with legibility) to be ridiculous on it's face. If your intention is to communicate information, it needs to be legible, clear, and understandable. If your goal is to make beautiful designs, fine, but understand and state your goal. Not a single website redesign here would ever work, and would be offensive as a user trying to consume information. Design is about embracing constraints for the medium to solve a goal. This is about removing any constraint to make a pretty picture. Great, looks nice, but I won't ever use it. So what was the real goal?
esotericn 8y ago
They don't. Trivial example: Hacker News looks nothing like Medium. All blogs on Medium look the same though. The mainstream web looks the same because it's all gone through the same funnel. The web is split. You have the oldschool developer part (mostly textmode with the odd showoff project), and the mainstream part (full of GDPR banners, advertisements, cookies, tracking stuff, 10MB page loads, etc).
- paulie_a 8y ago
  The GDPR pop-ups are incredibly annoying. The particular website has no obligation to comply with it. Most websites don't need to even give it a thought. It seems to just be a knee jerk reaction yet it is irrelevant.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I normally don't complain about downvotes, because honestly who cares. But I am curious why I do get consistently downvoted for simply stating that the GDPR is not relevant for a significant portion of the internet. EU users might not like it. But it's true. Most websites do not need a banner. They can absolutely flaunt compliance without worries.
thrownaway954 8y ago
WordPress "WORDPRESS IS POWERING 26% OF THE WEB" https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/ https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/
mikekij 8y ago
I was with the author, until I saw the HN redesign. Looked beautiful, but not functional. Made me realize why HN / reddit / quora / etc use the format they do: it works.
skimberk1 8y ago
All of the real content lives outside the context. http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/ http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/
hartator 8y ago
"Why do all websites look the same?" and it's a Medium post. More seriously, I think the Internet has the reverse issue. Every website looks and is used differently. You don't have to figure out how to turn pages when reading a new book.
deltron3030 8y ago
Do they look the same? Or does the differentiation just take place on a lower level of detail that is hidden to the author of the article?
programminggeek 8y ago
Lord help them when they realize that all designed things tend to look the same. Within a particular generation, all things tend toward a familiar design. There is a herd mentality to fit in with the crowd, allowing for only minor differences.
laythea 8y ago
Please don't encourage these kind of interfaces to websites. A website is not a piece of art. It's a thing I interface with! Your fellow users and I, thank you.
- rchaud 8y ago
  At no point did the author argue that your local bank's website should resemble one of the examples. It is an article about unconventional designs on the web, of course he is going to show the most out-there examples from his students. Personally I loved the cyberpunk feel of the Hacker News prototype, even though it's a usability nightmare. I like to view this stuff to engage my imagination and think about what's possible, not whether this design is ready to scale to millions of users.
kuon 8y ago
Every time I try to do something original I go back to something generic because of the following reasons: - Supporting all devices makes custom design really hard, with need to design for phones, tablets, PC in all kind of browser window size/ratio. Different screen size, dpi and input type. - Accessibility is really hard with out of the ordinary designs. - A website must "give out its content" in seconds. You cannot establish a relation with the user like, say, in games.
madamelic 8y ago
Designers: "Let's make it avant garde" Business People: "Let's make it fast" Developers: "Choose one"
jackconnor 8y ago
The attempt at redesigning the web ends in unreadable nonsense, so I think that answers the question of "why" with "readability"?
jsgo 8y ago
Looking at this and then the 4 examples they give, wow, I appreciate Bootstrap more (saying Bootstrap as it tends to be blamed for conformity of websites now). The reason why Bootstrap is nice relative to what they give as examples is that while (usually) it looks pretty, the content is what you focus on and not the dissonance that the UI creates. In the case of the art ones, it makes sense as I imagine that was the intent, to flip the focus, so as an art exhibition, that's perfectly fine and good. But as a website, I wouldn't use it. It reminds me of early days (around 1995. I remember buying No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom CD around this time and their band's URL wasn't a custom domain but something hosted by one of their labels, I believe. Different times). A lot of bands, with Nine Inch Nails being a bigger one, would go for these UI nightmare sites with, my guess, the intent that they're essentially a game of sorts seeking out hidden stuff. Those types of things turned me off (still liked the music though, just not the sites), but I know there are those who loved them so more power to them.
wolco 8y ago
Because everyone decided to use a framework. It helped standardize design. I'm against this but I can see the benefits of the same layout.
deleted 8y ago
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happertiger 8y ago
Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser, the relationship diagram... these are the same explorations of early flash and dhtml websites. It’s challenging to rebel against the dominant paradigm because everyone ends up with tattoos and blue hair and alternative becomes mainstream all over again.
happertiger 8y ago
Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser,
JeffreyKaine 8y ago
This is a case where an Artist has confused themselves with a designer. Designers solve problems, often by using existing conventions to help an interface/tool/object/room be instantly usable and understandable. An artist flexes their creativity and communicates thoughts through imagery/experience/sound.
password03 8y ago
I prefer same type design as opposed to going off piste.. In fact, if I want to leard about something or somebody I will often choose Wikipedia primarily over something else because I know it's format and can get straight to digesting the information I came for. (The issue of me using a crowdsourced platform as a prioritised source of something else for a different discussion)
tambourine_man 8y ago
Says the guy writing on medium. They don't, you're reading the wrong sites.
sxp62000 8y ago
None of the examples the author shared are usable. They're different just for the sake of being different. This sort of stuff only works for marketing campaigns that have a short shelf-life or maybe art museums. I'm surprised a bunch of people who call themselves interaction designers put little thought into how people would actually interact with these "web-art" masterpieces.
z3t4 8y ago
If you compare web sites that are hand crafted to web sites created with a CMS and template, of course the hand crafted sites will be more unique. If you want to master design and user interfaces, you must first learn all the rules, but then you must break them!
efitz 8y ago
Why is there layout on the web at all? In almost every case, I care about the content, not the particular web site designer’s vision of the “experience”. I don’t want an experience, I want information. I would prefer the content be delivered to my browser with metadata describing what it is, e.g. “news article” or “comment” or “image of purchasable item”, and choose my own experience- that is best for me. Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own.
- krapp 8y ago
  > Why is there layout on the web at all? For the same reason text in a book is arranged in paragraphs, and why magazines separate articles into headers, body text, insets, etc, rather than having all printed media be simply unformatted text. Having navigational elements and content groups on a site (a "layout") with a predictable visual style allows users to more easily differentiate between the different parts of a site, their different functions, and to navigate those sections more easily. Typographic elements like headers, paragraphs, font styling (bold, underline, etc.) make text easier to read and communicate concepts like hierarchy and emphasis. Flow is a necessary consideration when incorporating non-textual elements such as images into a document alongside text. Modern sites must also consider how they will appear on multiple screen sizes down to mobile. >Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own. A remote party isn't controlling your experience, they're sending you documents in a markup language, and your browser is interpreting that markup. If you want to download and view raw HTML then you can wget the pages and open them in the text editor of your choice (I think RMS does something like that to avoid executing nonfree code), but you should realize that most people don't want to view raw metadata and have to write their own stylesheet and schema for each site, they just want to read the document.
  - efitz 8y ago
    I want to decouple layout from content, and control layout myself locally. There is too much active content and too much commingling of style directives and content in most modern web sites. I want the markup to be higher level and focus on describing the content rather than specifying style.
woodpanel 8y ago
> Why do all websites look the same? This question puts two things in the spotlight: 1) the all too common software developer's ignorance for the art of design 2) the all too common designer's ignorance for the art of frontend software (which is usually data retrieval and entry, using common and learned UX functionality) There often is a lack of humbleness regarding putting what I (designer) fancy behind what users need. OTOH devs admire things like material design today or bootstrap in the old days as a way to "solve" design. Yet, those frameworks only touch half of what design is needed for (common UX patterns, don't come across as unprofessional) and fail at the other. I.e. there is no uniqueness, subliminal mood, branding, emotion or even recognizability in most pages/apps that use those frameworks. The idea of letting A/B tests guide your design decisions gave us the many ugly things Google did in the past. And while they certainly improved on design, material design breathes the same spirit. The spirit of design as something "to solve". Luckily with material design's CDK this spirit seems to be solved too :-)
Hoasi 8y ago
Interesting article and there is some truth to it. Although to be fair, the counter-examples provided, while interesting and nice, are almost all unpractical, illegible or hard to navigate. A lot of work went there, sure, but the results kind of weaken his otherwise good points.
aicioara 8y ago
As a hacker with no design background, reading Design for Hackers [1] was life changing. I finally understood that design is just a set of rules and that really modelled well on my engineering mindset. Add to that frameworks such as Bootstrap CSS and opinionated website builders such as Weebly and I finally overcame a major limitation in my skillset. I could now actually build what I wanted to build, knowing that it looks decent and I can focus on what is under the hood. If the web all looks the same, it is probably because it is built by people like me who need a rigid framework to work within. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-...
sfoblows2017 8y ago
Those same sample web sites have fing ctr of fing 0% Cool, hip, trendy, websites are fun bro. However, people want to get paid. So,sorry bro, no whimsical customer journeys. cr > all.
buboard 8y ago
It's a broader problem. Why do all phones look the same?
mproud 8y ago
Readability and legibility are important, too.
systematical 8y ago
Why do all cars look the same? Houses? I could go on.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Because rectilinear layout is well-supported ... but completely non-intuitive and artless. Options to do otherwise are painful and time-consuming and immediately run into browser incompatibilities. Just try laying out a series of iconic buttons in a swooping curve. Or try laying out some text inside a circle ... or just making a circle, a triangle, a leaf-shape... or fitting an image between two columns of text ... The tools to do all of this were available 25 years ago in desktop-publishing apps. Creating a beautiful page took design skills, but the layout was not done with CSS but by drawing on the page and making adjustments with handles. Not by endless hours of fussing with CSS version xyz and grids and flexes and compromises by sacrificing original intent. HTML layout is absurdly painful. Most people with deadlines don't have time to spend hours to make it work in one browser, switching to another browser and SCREAMING, and tossing it all out and returning to rectilinear boxes. That's why.
stevew20 8y ago
The redesigns are... Illegible and hard to read.
V-2 8y ago
These stylistic experiments on breaking away from the 'by the numbers' routines immediately reminded me of Vonnegut's "pity the readers" advice, acknowledging the inevitable limitations of artistic liberty of a writer. 7. Pity the readers They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years. So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. Pity your average web surfer.
sizzle 8y ago
"We have the capability to implement almost every conceivable idea and layout. We can create radical, surprising, and evocative websites. We can combine experimental typography with generative images and interactive experiences.” Depends on the type of website, for example, if it’s a banking or airline ticketing website, my tolerance for creativity for the sake of differentiation is non-existent. I am not passively consuming media, I came to the site to complete a task and want to get it done with the least friction and advertising shoved in my face as possible. Similarly, this is why I’ll never stop using ad-blockers and keep mentally noting which sites employ scummy UX dark patterns so I can spread awareness of alternatives to friends and family-- cause I consider 'dark patterns' both psychological opportunistic and predatory. People use technology as a means to an end, whether to check their savings account balance, chat with friends, or look up information, introducing friction in the form of 'avant-garde' creativity without UX research/data on the impact to usability, is a recipe for disaster on user engagement metrics and revenue stream intimately tracked by upper management to justify continuing to pay the salaries of designers, developers, product/project managers/BSAs, etc. and to keep the lights on at a majority of tech companies (in my experience). Thoughts?
zapzupnz 8y ago
I don't understand what the author was aiming for with this. "Designers are lazy and unimaginative; why don't they all make their websites look like these unusable, ugly explosions in a type foundry?" I wouldn't even ~~be able to~~ want to read a static document that looked like those examples.

269 points by guzik 8y ago

Here's the concept of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ if someone missed it

V-2 8y ago
Not to sound mean, but I'd prefer all websites looking generic (as uninventive as it might be), if this is supposed to represent the alternative.
- guzik 8y ago
  I am not the author, but I do agree.
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
This is completely unusable -is it supposed to be a parody?
- ardy42 8y ago
  It's the 4th example in the article. Superimposing the text of one comment over another may look cool, but doing so means you gave no thought to the experience of the user.
- laurent123456 8y ago
  I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.
daveFNbuck 8y ago
This looks awesome, but it's completely unusable.
mcv 8y ago
What the fuck is that? It certainly looks cool, but I have no idea what it is, what it's for, or how to use it. Being usable and looking really cool often don't go together very well. I suppose the few cases where they do, are the mark of a truly great designer.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I'm surprised he even categorized HN as looking the same. This place is very streamlined compared to other news aggregator type sites, even pre-redesign Reddit.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 8y ago
  HN is basically a vBulletin forum from 15 years ago with less functionality. Metafilter and Slashdot are similar and their looks haven't changed much since they started. The HN Redesign probably happened because the API was easy to use by students and they wanted to experiment with "cyberpunk" style interface, for which a text heavy site like HN was perfeect. It isn't at all the type of site
jim_bailie 8y ago
Nice, but too cool
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Bluecobra 8y ago
I think HK has one of the best (if not the best) design of any news aggregator sites out there. It’s perfect and I hope it doesn’t ever change. I can’t think of many websites that scale so well from a mobile phone to a desktop computer.
CM30 8y ago
Which itself is a perfect showcase for why most sites look the same. That redesign is virtually unusable, and goes so far into being 'art' that it just doesn't work as a discussion forum. Still, maybe it's more the article writer's concepts of a unique website that don't work more than all sites being the same being a bad thing. Their redesign for Medium.com is nearly as unusable too: https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism I get the creativity in letting people adjust the length of words/negativity of words/number of most common words in an article, but like the Hacker News redesign, it just creates an unreadable mess. You can make something different without making it unusable, and most of these redesigns fail miserably at that.
magduf 8y ago
This is very impressive from a technical perspective, but for actual using it, it's truly horrible. I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.

LitFan 8y ago

All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around. This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on). From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects of them) get blended with the standard.

cnasc 8y ago
> All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around. Yes. This is quite similar to asking why all newspapers look the same.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  One of them is pink. It's quite distinctive, but has not spawned a flock of imitators in blue, yellow, etc. The USA Today was the first to use color in the masthead (and on every daily paper's front page), and that has been copied by some.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Attribute improvements are adopted when they make broad sense (including economic). The same with color television, or improvements in book printing quality. Comprehensive macro changes usually only occur when there is a rather extreme inflection point in technology that makes a true leap possible. Something that was previously impossible not only becomes possible, but makes the experience a lot better for the end user. That's why the iPhone approach murdered the old flip phone industry so rapidly, that technology inflection made a lot of new things possible that were very beneficial / desirable to end users. It justified a large macro change, which users had to adjust to.
amelius 8y ago
I don't think this is true. I think designs get copied from websites which are successful (in all ways, not just design), because people have positive feelings with those designs, and also because using them requires a learning effort. It doesn't mean, however, that the designs themselves are best.

pssflops 8y ago

I can't think of another website that even remotely resembles superbad [0] and that's quite okay with me. [0]: http://superbad.com http://superbad.com

deanCommie 8y ago

Websites are not art* They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi-directionally. Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art. In all cases functionality is most important - which is not incompatible with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too. But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay. As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well. * Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.

ardy42 8y ago
> As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well. I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design fads and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier" than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the most effective or functional for the particular use-case.
ken 8y ago
> Websites are not art* They are communication mediums. I'm not sure what you think "art" is, but art is communication. That's the whole point. That's all it is. As the article (mis-)quotes, "Don't mistake legibility for communication." Writing a text-only webpage isn't somehow opting out of art, any more than a brutalist building is opting out of architecture.
blue4 8y ago
I would tend to agree on those points but I also want to believe that websites are an art form. While content strategy and user experience are now in a pre-thought context rather than an after thought, it obviously is about displaying something useful. But it almost stagnates new ideas from coming to the forefront it leads to us all getting swept into the game of 'creating the same layout,' all sites become a boring shell with different words.
exodust 8y ago
Why is everyone comparing websites with physical objects like cars, phones, laptops, and buildings? As soon as you do that, you've broken whatever conclusion you put forward next... "...and because of the way cement is poured into the foundations of modern office buildings, that's why everyone is using the same website template". Sorry, but you'll need to try a lot harder with your analogies.

malvosenior 8y ago

There's some irony to having this posted on Medium which is about the most generic looking site on the internet.

mcv 8y ago
My thought exactly, even when I clicked on the link. I think publishing this in Medium rather than on one of those designs of their students, kinda proves why most websites prefer to look boring.
grvdrm 8y ago
Indeed -- made it hard to read the actual article knowing it was posted on Medium

shshhdhs 8y ago

None of these “redesigned web” examples are balanced or readable. While I’m not convinced today’s design is the most optimal, I’d prefer them over any of these futuristic examples

tvanantwerp 8y ago

"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html

mcv 8y ago
By that logic, all websites should look like Facebook.
- athenot 8y ago
  Most platforms already do.
- ntumlin 8y ago
  I'm not sure that's wrong. Look at the (temporary) outrage whenever Facebook does a redesign, even Facebook is allowed to not look like Facebook.
  - stepvhen 8y ago
    FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely. A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed. So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      > they always added and pushed some functionality Most of the outrage I remember was around hiding and removing functionality: Chronological newsfeed, page customizations, network pages, etc

mcv 8y ago

I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the same. Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar. Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations, nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at transferring the content, the story, to your head. Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A design that distracts from the content is not practical.

sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
Geocities and MySpace comes to mind when seeing the redesigns. Websites needed some type of convention for the average user to feel comfortable using.
- Semiapies 8y ago
  The designs offered really remind me more of graphic designers' websites from the 1990s—confusing, impenetrable, but vaguely artsy. Some people need to be reminded that design is not just being artsy. Design is for accomplishing purpose beyond screenshots to put on one's portfolio.
nindalf 8y ago
Like Hacker News. Most of us are on this website right now via the browser. It's the same interface it's been for years, and that familiarity increases the efficiency of understanding. Re-imaginging everything is a great opportunity for designers to showcase their skills, but wouldn't really improve users' efficiency.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
apocalypstyx 8y ago

TylerH 8y ago

In the past: holy grail layout Now: masonry layout / infinite scrolling

chippy 8y ago

I think it's because web design used to be a branch of graphic design, and now it's not - it's now a branch of web development. Designs for websites were made in photoshop by creatives. Now designs for websites are made by front end engineers, or UX consultants.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Exactly. Making an artistic and unique website is simply too expensive. Think of all the lost revenue. Web design has become a science of analytics crunching, conversion optimization and retention. The author seems to show total ignorance for human pattern recognition.

pcarolan 8y ago

I think he left SEO as a reason out of this article. We're now building websites as much for humans as for google crawlers to read them, which means meeting standards of accordance in order to even participate in the SEO game. H1, H2, H3 tags, layout, and content headers don't have to look the same or be layed out or structured the same, but many sites have deviated from these formats at their own peril only to return to the warm embrace of conformity. Not to mention that Amp is basically a design standard as much as a content standard.

dgdg 8y ago

Because of Bootstrap. Everyone uses it. Every old website that looked different in the past, now does a UI refresh (by just using Bootstrap out of the box with minimal customisation) and becomes another one of those the same looking websites.

wild_preference 8y ago
Outside of the HN comment bubble, nobody uses Bootstrap. And it doesn't explain the examples in TFA.
- david-cako 8y ago
  Speaking anecdotally, up to around 2016 every other website used Bootstrap or Foundation, often with minimal customization, just because it looks and works well out of the box on all devices. Now it seems like it's getting better, but generic UI components are an extremely relevant aspect. Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me "it's about the functionality, not the design". https://promethease.com/ https://promethease.com/ Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.

Konryan 8y ago

Those examples make me very, very glad all the websites 'look the same'.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
Indeed. The web is more consistent than its ever been, and I think that's a very good thing - it means that I'm not often surprised when I scroll down and the page moves to the right (I'm looking at you, Apple...)

iambateman 8y ago

Turns out, 95% of the Internet is used for practical purposes, and certain best practices arise...a balance between the content and the ads. The other 5% is a self-expressive art project. Part of me wonders if the author is trolling everyone by writing an article about the need for more unique design on Medium.com.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
This person takes the time to write an infuriating rant but can’t take the time to understand human pattern recognition, the reason why the web is the way it is.
croisillon 8y ago
reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995

cortexio 8y ago

Why do all roads look the same? Cry me a river

actionscripted 8y ago

Also: 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.

magduf 8y ago
You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts. 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.

lostgame 8y ago

The answer to this as of the last 5-10 years seems to be to simply be 'responsive design'. Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design pattern at this point.

Deinos 8y ago

Donald Norman does a good job explaining why in The Design of Everyday Things. I am sure most of you have probably read it, but if you haven't... https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107/ https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/...

chuckgreenman 8y ago

> David Carson once said, “don’t confuse communication with legibility.” We should apply this advice to the current state of web design. Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list. Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds. I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.

SippinLean 8y ago
Carson was saying that as a rejection of minimalism. It was an embrace of experimental graphic design. He was specifically saying that "efficiency and the ability to be understood" were not always the most important factors in a design.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

Off topic but these days I load every website in reader view. It’s amazing how annoying custom fonts, sizes and colors become once you get used to reader view for everything. Doesn’t matter what font, font size, color or layout you use - I won’t see it and I love it.

satori99 8y ago
I do this too. I scan the first paragraph or two and if I decide it is worth reading, I hit the reader button. I really couldn't care less about modern web design -- Just show me the text.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  You can set every page to open in reader view automatically by pressing and holding that icon I think.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Modern design is just so tiring. A wide range of font sizes from tiny to huge, impossible contrast ratios, font choices that stain the mind, media that distracts from the message - all add up to tiring me out mentally.

jonathanmarcus 8y ago

"Generic fonts" The web had ~ 5 system fonts before Web Fonts were available in 2008 / 2009. Now the web has many thousands of the best fonts ever created by the world's best foundries.

cronix 8y ago
Yes, another "cool" thing slowing down loading/rendering the site. "Waiting for fonts.googleapis.com"...

haburka 8y ago

Ironically, this is a medium post. Why didn’t the author make their own website to demonstrate how creative they can be? The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you’re going to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front end is hard, so that’s not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.

JeanMarcS 8y ago

If the search area is not on top right, everybody will loose time looking for it. Web is not art anymore. It's mainstream. It might be sad, but well... Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design. You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them. Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ? Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ? Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt. Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas. Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.

atoav 8y ago

Because Designers don't know how to build them without using frameworks. Because Customers don't know what they need, but very much what they want.

krapp 8y ago
Most frameworks are built around readability and a few standard layout configurations based on the principles of magazine page design and typography. What do customers need that modern web frameworks don't provide, and why is it wrong for customers to want the web to be familiar and unobtrusive?

zallarak 8y ago

"Type Primer" was a revealing and relevant read for this topic. Design is about functionality, and good typography and alignment can often-times get you there. Colors, shapes, etc. are interesting for art; but when someone needs to use what you've built, ensuring functionality is clear is crucial.

anotheryou 8y ago

Swiss style design solved much of bad design. If you divert from that you better have a reason and be good at it or just layer something unique on top.

r00dY 8y ago

I run a front-end agency that specializes in helping top-league branding agencies and designers code their websites. Designers try to make sth fresh and out of the box all the time. The problem with these solutions are: 1. UX sucks 2. Don't scale to other resolutions (especially mobile / tablet). 3. EXTREMELY expensive to code comparing to "boring" web solutions (multipliers might be as big as 5-10x) So most of the work we do is to try to make designers think with patterns ("boring" but the only way to fit in budget) and try to get as much as they can from STATIC design. Play with typography, key visuals, content etc. This is where their work brings most value for reasonable money. The author of the article is a professor, so wouldn't expect realistic business thinking from him. He might be sad because web is boring, but usually no one wants to spend huge amount of money for prototypes where there's 95% probability that UX and stability will be worse than standard. And there's a HUGE value in familiarity for users. That's why most of "creative projects" end up looking pretty similar at the end. I've seen many e-commerce sites which had "fancy design" and after months/years ended up with standard e-comm layout. Also, web today is super hard comparing to 10 years ago. Number of things to think about multiplied by A LOT. Coding great static website with all things stable and looking great is a big task already. It's like asking for a car with steering wheel in the back or with 3 wheels and paying for it 5x more. Do you want one? EDIT: Not saying "creative projects" are bad or sth, they sometimes are super coool. But I treat them more like "web art installation". Nice if you like them but not really practical.

criddell 8y ago

Matthew Butterick wrote about this 5 years ago: https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/ https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/ Even publications that produce a beautiful paper product seem to be willing to accept a garbage design when they post it online.

blunte 8y ago

Depends on the purpose of the website. If the purpose is to convey information, then there will be quite some similarities between websites that share that purpose. If the purpose is to use the web as a medium of artistic expression, then you can see some variety. But that's likely a small percentage of websites by purpose.

deegles 8y ago

"People spend most of their time browsing other websites" Yes, it's a truism, but it explains why site designs converge. Fewer people will be willing to learn your site's custom layout and behavior.

r00dY 8y ago

"Somewhere between $20m and $100m ARR, All marketing sites converge on an identical design" https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152 https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152

jordache 8y ago

why do all cars look the same? why do all magazine covers look the same? why do all the graphics on cable news channels look the same? These are questions that do not require an article worth of words for analysis..

msla 8y ago

I'd say these re-designs are inaccessible but people would get the wrong idea; inaccessible usually means not accessible to people who have handicaps of some variety, and that doesn't accurately capture the problems with these re-designed websites: They're not accessible to anyone, anywhere, regardless of how able they are, unless they're the designer themself. They not only blindly assume you have the latest web browser technology and are willing to use it, heedless of security concerns and basic propriety, on relatively minor sites, they assume you've crawled up inside the designer's head and therefore see the site the way the designer sees it. Which brings me to why sites "All Look The Same" (kind of a stupid thing to say, but I'll not fight it): It's a design language, something where designers and users can agree which elements do what, what affordances they have, and, therefore, how to use the site to get what they want from it. None of the re-designs follow that. None of the re-designs are respectful of anyone else. These re-designs are a bad parody of design work, and make designers look bad by association.

ryu2k2 8y ago

All webdevs use the same tools that push certain directions. No webdev has the time to be creative and try out new things so they build each website the same way. Diversity is found near exclusively in the domain of homepages built by people not in the business that didn't make their website to put on a resume to proof they can use whatever tool is currently in.

alan_n 8y ago

I don't think anyone has mentioned it apart from the fact most people would find these confusing, but these types of layouts look like accessibility nightmares, and for what benefit? Making something look a bit nicer? I mean, it's fine if the main goal of the website is to be artistic, but as others have pointed out, that's not the main goal of most websites, it's communicating information.

JAdamMoore 8y ago

Because not everyone wants to solve a friggin puzzle, genius.

otras 8y ago

I also recommend the author's follow up article "Balancing Creativity and Usability" [0]. [0]: https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-usability-9bb2cd0fe929 https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and-usabilit...

Kagerjay 8y ago

I still think there's a lot of subtle UX innovation going around. You just need to know where to look. Some more well known sites include: - Medium - Atlas Obscura - Techcrunch - New York Times (visual / interactive story articles) - https://baymard.com/research https://baymard.com/research - ecommerce UX research Not all UX design content mediums have been invented yet, there's billions of permutations, and different content requirements. Different color, typography, color psychology, shadows, icons, animations, etc all change the way a story is told. A website is just a content medium, much like a video or image. However, at the end of the day, content will mostly be the same. It's just CSS and JS changing the look and feel of the site. Example, one static HTML file and multiple CSS implementations: http://csszengarden.com http://csszengarden.com. To the untrained eye, every site does look the same. My definition of good UX is this - minimize the total distance your eyes have to adjust, and maximize the amount of content captured. Without being overly fatiguing (usage of whitespace, eye relief, etc).

codingdave 8y ago

Why shouldn't they look the same? They are tools. Usually for communication, and you usually want your visitors to intuitively know how to navigate your content. By all means, feel free to break conventions if you have a purpose in doing so, but for most brochure sites or information-based sites, you have no reason for such things. Quite the contrary, when I set up a site for someone, I tell them to make it match their brand, but not to get overly creative other aspects of the design. A creative design may be interesting, but is that the goal of the site? To convince the audience that you found an interesting designer? Or do you want to communicate something about your product/project? Simple, effective designs have evolved over the last couple decades. Designers should experiment, as that is their purpose, and it is how we avoid stagnation. Everyone else should use what works.

ryanisnan 8y ago

Truth be told, when a website is totally unconventional, it has my attention for a short time, generally on account of novelty. Once that has worn off, unless the site is exceedingly usable, memorable or memorable, I'm out. It's taxing to have to visually search, analyze, scaffold, and navigate a new mental model of how I expect a website to behave. And therein lies the problem, people have expectations of websites, and it is generally in their best interest to conform to existing standards.

Fnoord 8y ago

They don't look the same; you can make an argument they look similar though. "Fabian and Florian turned Hacker News into an interactive visualization. The social media site is a news aggregator, focusing on computer science and information technology. Its design is bare-bones but it has complex functionality for voting and discussions. Fabian and Florian have taken the existing structure and turned it into a typographic space of timelines and networks. The visual presentation is based on the sequence and connections of news and comments. They also connected their design to the API of Hacker News, so you can actually use it to read the site. View the redesign of Hacker News." And the redesign is a usability nightmare. You cannot easily skip a topic you're not interested in, and you cannot even skip the comments easily which are emphasized. In normal HN, you can browse news.ycombinator.com and click on the links from there. You can open the original links and the HN discussions in tabs. Not in this redesign. Perhaps it is God's greatest gift on mobile (I tried it on desktop), I don't know. Examples of doing it different should be objectively better; this one doesn't appear to be such an example, so don't mention it [1]. Instead, go back to the drawing board. [1] There's also a bug that clicking on No. and Pts. gets you to that user's hompeage. Which could be 1 or 76, but it has nothing to do with that userID.

lasagnaphil 8y ago
I’ve tried it on mobile. (iPhone 8) The whole thing takes more than five seconds to load, and the UI is basically unusuable. Tried clicking at an article, comment text is almost impossible to read due to the broken layout.

Yhippa 8y ago

I was going to blame Bootstrap for this but then found this on the site: https://expo.getbootstrap.com https://expo.getbootstrap.com. Some really good examples of innovative design even using good old Bootstrap.

natecavanaugh 8y ago

No, just no. I understand that to push the current state further, you need to think outside of the box, but what you call bland, I call essential to communication. I find the David Carson quote (confusing communication with legibility) to be ridiculous on it's face. If your intention is to communicate information, it needs to be legible, clear, and understandable. If your goal is to make beautiful designs, fine, but understand and state your goal. Not a single website redesign here would ever work, and would be offensive as a user trying to consume information. Design is about embracing constraints for the medium to solve a goal. This is about removing any constraint to make a pretty picture. Great, looks nice, but I won't ever use it. So what was the real goal?

esotericn 8y ago

They don't. Trivial example: Hacker News looks nothing like Medium. All blogs on Medium look the same though. The mainstream web looks the same because it's all gone through the same funnel. The web is split. You have the oldschool developer part (mostly textmode with the odd showoff project), and the mainstream part (full of GDPR banners, advertisements, cookies, tracking stuff, 10MB page loads, etc).

paulie_a 8y ago
The GDPR pop-ups are incredibly annoying. The particular website has no obligation to comply with it. Most websites don't need to even give it a thought. It seems to just be a knee jerk reaction yet it is irrelevant.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  I normally don't complain about downvotes, because honestly who cares. But I am curious why I do get consistently downvoted for simply stating that the GDPR is not relevant for a significant portion of the internet. EU users might not like it. But it's true. Most websites do not need a banner. They can absolutely flaunt compliance without worries.

thrownaway954 8y ago

WordPress "WORDPRESS IS POWERING 26% OF THE WEB" https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/ https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/

mikekij 8y ago

I was with the author, until I saw the HN redesign. Looked beautiful, but not functional. Made me realize why HN / reddit / quora / etc use the format they do: it works.

skimberk1 8y ago

All of the real content lives outside the context. http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/ http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/

hartator 8y ago

"Why do all websites look the same?" and it's a Medium post. More seriously, I think the Internet has the reverse issue. Every website looks and is used differently. You don't have to figure out how to turn pages when reading a new book.

deltron3030 8y ago

Do they look the same? Or does the differentiation just take place on a lower level of detail that is hidden to the author of the article?

programminggeek 8y ago

Lord help them when they realize that all designed things tend to look the same. Within a particular generation, all things tend toward a familiar design. There is a herd mentality to fit in with the crowd, allowing for only minor differences.

laythea 8y ago

Please don't encourage these kind of interfaces to websites. A website is not a piece of art. It's a thing I interface with! Your fellow users and I, thank you.

rchaud 8y ago
At no point did the author argue that your local bank's website should resemble one of the examples. It is an article about unconventional designs on the web, of course he is going to show the most out-there examples from his students. Personally I loved the cyberpunk feel of the Hacker News prototype, even though it's a usability nightmare. I like to view this stuff to engage my imagination and think about what's possible, not whether this design is ready to scale to millions of users.

kuon 8y ago

Every time I try to do something original I go back to something generic because of the following reasons: - Supporting all devices makes custom design really hard, with need to design for phones, tablets, PC in all kind of browser window size/ratio. Different screen size, dpi and input type. - Accessibility is really hard with out of the ordinary designs. - A website must "give out its content" in seconds. You cannot establish a relation with the user like, say, in games.

madamelic 8y ago

Designers: "Let's make it avant garde" Business People: "Let's make it fast" Developers: "Choose one"

jackconnor 8y ago

The attempt at redesigning the web ends in unreadable nonsense, so I think that answers the question of "why" with "readability"?

jsgo 8y ago

Looking at this and then the 4 examples they give, wow, I appreciate Bootstrap more (saying Bootstrap as it tends to be blamed for conformity of websites now). The reason why Bootstrap is nice relative to what they give as examples is that while (usually) it looks pretty, the content is what you focus on and not the dissonance that the UI creates. In the case of the art ones, it makes sense as I imagine that was the intent, to flip the focus, so as an art exhibition, that's perfectly fine and good. But as a website, I wouldn't use it. It reminds me of early days (around 1995. I remember buying No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom CD around this time and their band's URL wasn't a custom domain but something hosted by one of their labels, I believe. Different times). A lot of bands, with Nine Inch Nails being a bigger one, would go for these UI nightmare sites with, my guess, the intent that they're essentially a game of sorts seeking out hidden stuff. Those types of things turned me off (still liked the music though, just not the sites), but I know there are those who loved them so more power to them.

wolco 8y ago

Because everyone decided to use a framework. It helped standardize design. I'm against this but I can see the benefits of the same layout.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

happertiger 8y ago

Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser, the relationship diagram... these are the same explorations of early flash and dhtml websites. It’s challenging to rebel against the dominant paradigm because everyone ends up with tattoos and blue hair and alternative becomes mainstream all over again.

happertiger 8y ago

Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That’s the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser,

JeffreyKaine 8y ago

This is a case where an Artist has confused themselves with a designer. Designers solve problems, often by using existing conventions to help an interface/tool/object/room be instantly usable and understandable. An artist flexes their creativity and communicates thoughts through imagery/experience/sound.

password03 8y ago

I prefer same type design as opposed to going off piste.. In fact, if I want to leard about something or somebody I will often choose Wikipedia primarily over something else because I know it's format and can get straight to digesting the information I came for. (The issue of me using a crowdsourced platform as a prioritised source of something else for a different discussion)

tambourine_man 8y ago

Says the guy writing on medium. They don't, you're reading the wrong sites.

sxp62000 8y ago

None of the examples the author shared are usable. They're different just for the sake of being different. This sort of stuff only works for marketing campaigns that have a short shelf-life or maybe art museums. I'm surprised a bunch of people who call themselves interaction designers put little thought into how people would actually interact with these "web-art" masterpieces.

z3t4 8y ago

If you compare web sites that are hand crafted to web sites created with a CMS and template, of course the hand crafted sites will be more unique. If you want to master design and user interfaces, you must first learn all the rules, but then you must break them!

efitz 8y ago

Why is there layout on the web at all? In almost every case, I care about the content, not the particular web site designer’s vision of the “experience”. I don’t want an experience, I want information. I would prefer the content be delivered to my browser with metadata describing what it is, e.g. “news article” or “comment” or “image of purchasable item”, and choose my own experience- that is best for me. Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own.

krapp 8y ago
> Why is there layout on the web at all? For the same reason text in a book is arranged in paragraphs, and why magazines separate articles into headers, body text, insets, etc, rather than having all printed media be simply unformatted text. Having navigational elements and content groups on a site (a "layout") with a predictable visual style allows users to more easily differentiate between the different parts of a site, their different functions, and to navigate those sections more easily. Typographic elements like headers, paragraphs, font styling (bold, underline, etc.) make text easier to read and communicate concepts like hierarchy and emphasis. Flow is a necessary consideration when incorporating non-textual elements such as images into a document alongside text. Modern sites must also consider how they will appear on multiple screen sizes down to mobile. >Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I’d rather control my own. A remote party isn't controlling your experience, they're sending you documents in a markup language, and your browser is interpreting that markup. If you want to download and view raw HTML then you can wget the pages and open them in the text editor of your choice (I think RMS does something like that to avoid executing nonfree code), but you should realize that most people don't want to view raw metadata and have to write their own stylesheet and schema for each site, they just want to read the document.
- efitz 8y ago
  I want to decouple layout from content, and control layout myself locally. There is too much active content and too much commingling of style directives and content in most modern web sites. I want the markup to be higher level and focus on describing the content rather than specifying style.

woodpanel 8y ago

> Why do all websites look the same? This question puts two things in the spotlight: 1) the all too common software developer's ignorance for the art of design 2) the all too common designer's ignorance for the art of frontend software (which is usually data retrieval and entry, using common and learned UX functionality) There often is a lack of humbleness regarding putting what I (designer) fancy behind what users need. OTOH devs admire things like material design today or bootstrap in the old days as a way to "solve" design. Yet, those frameworks only touch half of what design is needed for (common UX patterns, don't come across as unprofessional) and fail at the other. I.e. there is no uniqueness, subliminal mood, branding, emotion or even recognizability in most pages/apps that use those frameworks. The idea of letting A/B tests guide your design decisions gave us the many ugly things Google did in the past. And while they certainly improved on design, material design breathes the same spirit. The spirit of design as something "to solve". Luckily with material design's CDK this spirit seems to be solved too :-)

Hoasi 8y ago

Interesting article and there is some truth to it. Although to be fair, the counter-examples provided, while interesting and nice, are almost all unpractical, illegible or hard to navigate. A lot of work went there, sure, but the results kind of weaken his otherwise good points.

aicioara 8y ago

As a hacker with no design background, reading Design for Hackers [1] was life changing. I finally understood that design is just a set of rules and that really modelled well on my engineering mindset. Add to that frameworks such as Bootstrap CSS and opinionated website builders such as Weebly and I finally overcame a major limitation in my skillset. I could now actually build what I wanted to build, knowing that it looks decent and I can focus on what is under the hood. If the web all looks the same, it is probably because it is built by people like me who need a rigid framework to work within. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-...

sfoblows2017 8y ago

Those same sample web sites have fing ctr of fing 0% Cool, hip, trendy, websites are fun bro. However, people want to get paid. So,sorry bro, no whimsical customer journeys. cr > all.

buboard 8y ago

It's a broader problem. Why do all phones look the same?

mproud 8y ago

Readability and legibility are important, too.

systematical 8y ago

Why do all cars look the same? Houses? I could go on.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Because rectilinear layout is well-supported ... but completely non-intuitive and artless. Options to do otherwise are painful and time-consuming and immediately run into browser incompatibilities. Just try laying out a series of iconic buttons in a swooping curve. Or try laying out some text inside a circle ... or just making a circle, a triangle, a leaf-shape... or fitting an image between two columns of text ... The tools to do all of this were available 25 years ago in desktop-publishing apps. Creating a beautiful page took design skills, but the layout was not done with CSS but by drawing on the page and making adjustments with handles. Not by endless hours of fussing with CSS version xyz and grids and flexes and compromises by sacrificing original intent. HTML layout is absurdly painful. Most people with deadlines don't have time to spend hours to make it work in one browser, switching to another browser and SCREAMING, and tossing it all out and returning to rectilinear boxes. That's why.

stevew20 8y ago

The redesigns are... Illegible and hard to read.

V-2 8y ago

These stylistic experiments on breaking away from the 'by the numbers' routines immediately reminded me of Vonnegut's "pity the readers" advice, acknowledging the inevitable limitations of artistic liberty of a writer. 7. Pity the readers They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years. So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. Pity your average web surfer.

sizzle 8y ago

"We have the capability to implement almost every conceivable idea and layout. We can create radical, surprising, and evocative websites. We can combine experimental typography with generative images and interactive experiences.” Depends on the type of website, for example, if it’s a banking or airline ticketing website, my tolerance for creativity for the sake of differentiation is non-existent. I am not passively consuming media, I came to the site to complete a task and want to get it done with the least friction and advertising shoved in my face as possible. Similarly, this is why I’ll never stop using ad-blockers and keep mentally noting which sites employ scummy UX dark patterns so I can spread awareness of alternatives to friends and family-- cause I consider 'dark patterns' both psychological opportunistic and predatory. People use technology as a means to an end, whether to check their savings account balance, chat with friends, or look up information, introducing friction in the form of 'avant-garde' creativity without UX research/data on the impact to usability, is a recipe for disaster on user engagement metrics and revenue stream intimately tracked by upper management to justify continuing to pay the salaries of designers, developers, product/project managers/BSAs, etc. and to keep the lights on at a majority of tech companies (in my experience). Thoughts?

zapzupnz 8y ago

I don't understand what the author was aiming for with this. "Designers are lazy and unimaginative; why don't they all make their websites look like these unusable, ugly explosions in a type foundry?" I wouldn't even ~~be able to~~ want to read a static document that looked like those examples.