8 ms·

Design like it’s 1999

112 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

MonaroVXR 7y ago
>This is a nice example of how easy it is to make something usable for someone like Simon. But it doesn’t really go beyond the usable. There is no personality in it, and we didn’t really explore other possible solutions. In the next chapter I will tell about the invisible animations I made together with Hannes Wallrafen. In this project we went beyond the functional by working with both identity and nonsensical ideas. I don't agree, the site did it's job and it did it well. This isn't from a company, so the personality isn't that important. The accessibility is more important in this case.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Think of it this way: for a screen reader, every bit of "identity" is a screaming popup. Even a simple image saying "welcome to x" gets old really quick. It is already in the page title. Narrative, linear, well delimited paginated interfaces like web search work much better, magic autoloading infinite or overly long lists do not. Short version: if it looks fine when styles, images are disabled, it's probably ok, as long as it does not try to mess with input.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    Remember CSS Naked Day? It’s coming up now, on April 9th.
- codingdave 7y ago
  > This isn't from a company, so the personality isn't that important. I'm curious what you mean by this? It seems to me that content from individuals is exactly where personality matters. And from a company, it matters less because both sides of the equation just want to get to a decision point on whether you'll use their product. Branding is a tool to help get to their desired outcome, not a goal in and of itself.
- elicash 7y ago
  This site has A TON of personality! Both in the copy "I'll keep it short" and also that it's unlike anything else on the web.
JensRex 7y ago
>Where did we go wrong?! I think JavaScript is what started the downward spiral that ruined the web. It's what enabled the shoehorning of the web browser into an application framework. Now Google, Facebook and Amazon and a few others control it, and are actively hostile against anyone who doesn't align with their interests.
- teddyh 7y ago
  Even before Javascript was fast enough, they already explored other avenues; i.e. toolbars and other proprietary plugins, like Flash. If Javascript had remained infeasible, some of these toolbars and plugins would have been pushed as de facto mandatory for the normal web.
- onion2k 7y ago
  I realise it's popular to rally against JS on HN, but in this case the article is about designing a good information hierarchy for users' with sight problems, and the state of accessible design was terrible long before JS apps came along. This is not a JS problem. It's a too-many-developers-don't-care-about-accessibility problem. It's been a problem at least since I started making web software in 1997. Going back to "design like it's 1999" would present users with things like this - https://web.archive.org/web/19991013122821/http://www.yahoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013122821/http://www.yahoo.... Try finding a link in that mess using a screenreader. You'd be sitting and waiting for it to read them all out for a while. Design was no better for accessibility back then. The takeaway here is really that when you design a website you need to take an accessibility-first approach. This is a good article to start - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibility-inclusion/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibi...
  - madeofpalk 7y ago
    One thing I also notice when seeing issues like this is that this is also a problem with both the assistive tools themselves, and the accessibility APIs and methods available to build web pages. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with building content and feature rich websites, but when we do it is difficult to build them in a way, with or without javascript, that's also useful to browse through screen readers. We have to resort to hacks like skip link hacks and the rest. I think not only do we have to get better at building accessible web pages, but the technology needs to get better to make building accessible web pages easier and more usable.
notahacker 7y ago
In 99, the screenreader would have serenaded him with visitor counters "This website has had over [graphic without alt text] visitors since July 1997" and "This site works best in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4" which isn't very comforting when he's using a screen reader, and the whole website would be laid out in a table, sometimes with menus that were sliced graphics instead of text, or entirely javascript. Meanwhile the accessibility wing of the web standardistas got so angry at people using font tags instead of the designated header markups that the font tag got deprecated when css browser coverage was half decent. And let's not even start on Flash.
- henriquez 7y ago
  Not to mention the prevalence of "Mystery Meat" navigation, where you couldn't know what a graphical link did until you hovered or clicked on it. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html (For whatever it's worth I still agree with the sentiment of the author here, just worth pointing out that the 1990's weren't a panacea and that usable web design has existed throughout history.)
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  You forgot image maps! For the younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map
username3 7y ago
Sitemaps or screenreaders.txt
userbinator 7y ago
Using a website that seems to be focused on video content as a demonstration of (in)accessibility for the blind seems a little unusual... perhaps something like a news site --- which has lots of textual content --- would make a better example.
- juanuys 7y ago
  A blind person browsing a video site does not necessarily mean they want to watch the videos. They might want to listen to the audio, or share the video links they find.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  People who use screenreaders aren't necessarily completely blind. Maybe they want to watch videos but have a vision impairment that makes reading the text on the site difficult, thus use a screenreader. People use screenreaders for many different reasons.
GrumpyNl 7y ago
He did pick one of the worst sites. The whole site is a design disaster with lots of times not working vids.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pliuchkin 7y ago
"Toggle Accessibility" button forwarding to a clean page.
blowski 7y ago
In my experience, many websites are an extension of their CEO's ego. They don't have the money to build a website that is both unique and usable, but there's no way they want to look everyone else - so they drop the requirement to be usable. They're the same people that drive impractical cars, because they look flashy.
- tyfon 7y ago
  That wouldn't fly where I live, there are a set of rules to make sure the website can be used by anyone and a company can be fined for breaking too many of the guidelines[1]. It's called "universal design" (or universell utforming in Norwegian) It's not like they hunt webpages that are breaking the law, but since I have carpal tunnel syndrome excessive scrolling is painful and I've been able to make a few local webpages change just by emailing them with the guidelines. The government even provides a test-suite [2] for your web page. I've seen plenty of the pages you mention that could use a touch of this :) [1] https://uu.difi.no/om-oss/english https://uu.difi.no/om-oss/english [2] https://uu.difi.no/krav-og-regelverk/testprosedyrar-nettstader https://uu.difi.no/krav-og-regelverk/testprosedyrar-nettstad... (Norwegian)
- sli 7y ago
  Yep. CEO of our company didn't like the progress on one of our frontends, so he took a weekend to write a whole new one himself, claiming it was "almost done." It was, as you may predict, nowhere near done, but still shoved into Git and became the new frontend. In reality he seemed offended that he didn't know much about how we (the frontend team) built it and he didn't like that, so he built the way he thinks he knows, which turned out to just be a hodge podge of code from various tutorials and no singular vision for how the application functions. There are no less than three different paradigms in use in this codebase, and none of them really play well together. The end result is that it took us nearly as long as it took us to develop the first version to bring the second version up to feature parity, but now we have a giant mess of a codebase that was very strictly written to do exactly the things the CEO wrote it to do. Predictably, development slowed to a crawl pretty quickly because we're essentially forced to rewrite every single individual piece that needs touching. I told them this was a bad idea and would only make things take far, far longer than finishing the one we had. The whole reason this was done? The CEO and CTO found some bugs but didn't want to file them on the issue tracker. They decided it was better that the CEO write his own, despite the CEO having exactly zero experience with frontend development. This is just one of a long line of bizarre decisions that I have accurately predicted would only cost us more time and money than is worth it. We're currently looking for new jobs.
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
Here is a two-fold win: use the Vimium extension for navigating the web. It lets you navigate web pages via keyboard shortcuts much faster than a mouse. Also, it readily exposes issues of non compliant links and navigation elements that would also be missed by a screen reader.
- nessunodoro 7y ago
  Shout out to one of my favorite projects, Luakit [^], the only chromeless browser that lets me resize the window to a single pixel. Best part is the vim interface, :open hacker news [ddg results] /Hack Enter :tabopen github top lua questions [Github search results] :bookmark ^ https://github.com/luakit/luakit https://github.com/luakit/luakit
Causality1 7y ago
The same layout is not going to work best for both sighted and impaired people. Attention spans are short and sight has an order of magnitude more information bandwidth than hearing.
nate 7y ago
Reminded me of a quote from Paul Arden: "All creative people need something to rebel against." It's why things were simple and easy to understand in 1999. But then we all rebelled making it more sophisticated and complicated on purpose. And then now we all want to rebel against what we've done. The pendulum swings and swings. I do prefer the 1999 version myself :)

112 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

>This is a nice example of how easy it is to make something usable for someone like Simon. But it doesn’t really go beyond the usable. There is no personality in it, and we didn’t really explore other possible solutions. In the next chapter I will tell about the invisible animations I made together with Hannes Wallrafen. In this project we went beyond the functional by working with both identity and nonsensical ideas. I don't agree, the site did it's job and it did it well. This isn't from a company, so the personality isn't that important. The accessibility is more important in this case.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Think of it this way: for a screen reader, every bit of "identity" is a screaming popup. Even a simple image saying "welcome to x" gets old really quick. It is already in the page title. Narrative, linear, well delimited paginated interfaces like web search work much better, magic autoloading infinite or overly long lists do not. Short version: if it looks fine when styles, images are disabled, it's probably ok, as long as it does not try to mess with input.
- teddyh 7y ago
  Remember CSS Naked Day? It’s coming up now, on April 9th.
codingdave 7y ago
> This isn't from a company, so the personality isn't that important. I'm curious what you mean by this? It seems to me that content from individuals is exactly where personality matters. And from a company, it matters less because both sides of the equation just want to get to a decision point on whether you'll use their product. Branding is a tool to help get to their desired outcome, not a goal in and of itself.
elicash 7y ago
This site has A TON of personality! Both in the copy "I'll keep it short" and also that it's unlike anything else on the web.

JensRex 7y ago

>Where did we go wrong?! I think JavaScript is what started the downward spiral that ruined the web. It's what enabled the shoehorning of the web browser into an application framework. Now Google, Facebook and Amazon and a few others control it, and are actively hostile against anyone who doesn't align with their interests.

teddyh 7y ago
Even before Javascript was fast enough, they already explored other avenues; i.e. toolbars and other proprietary plugins, like Flash. If Javascript had remained infeasible, some of these toolbars and plugins would have been pushed as de facto mandatory for the normal web.
onion2k 7y ago
I realise it's popular to rally against JS on HN, but in this case the article is about designing a good information hierarchy for users' with sight problems, and the state of accessible design was terrible long before JS apps came along. This is not a JS problem. It's a too-many-developers-don't-care-about-accessibility problem. It's been a problem at least since I started making web software in 1997. Going back to "design like it's 1999" would present users with things like this - https://web.archive.org/web/19991013122821/http://www.yahoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013122821/http://www.yahoo.... Try finding a link in that mess using a screenreader. You'd be sitting and waiting for it to read them all out for a while. Design was no better for accessibility back then. The takeaway here is really that when you design a website you need to take an accessibility-first approach. This is a good article to start - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibility-inclusion/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibi...
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  One thing I also notice when seeing issues like this is that this is also a problem with both the assistive tools themselves, and the accessibility APIs and methods available to build web pages. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with building content and feature rich websites, but when we do it is difficult to build them in a way, with or without javascript, that's also useful to browse through screen readers. We have to resort to hacks like skip link hacks and the rest. I think not only do we have to get better at building accessible web pages, but the technology needs to get better to make building accessible web pages easier and more usable.

notahacker 7y ago

In 99, the screenreader would have serenaded him with visitor counters "This website has had over [graphic without alt text] visitors since July 1997" and "This site works best in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4" which isn't very comforting when he's using a screen reader, and the whole website would be laid out in a table, sometimes with menus that were sliced graphics instead of text, or entirely javascript. Meanwhile the accessibility wing of the web standardistas got so angry at people using font tags instead of the designated header markups that the font tag got deprecated when css browser coverage was half decent. And let's not even start on Flash.

henriquez 7y ago
Not to mention the prevalence of "Mystery Meat" navigation, where you couldn't know what a graphical link did until you hovered or clicked on it. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html (For whatever it's worth I still agree with the sentiment of the author here, just worth pointing out that the 1990's weren't a panacea and that usable web design has existed throughout history.)
52-6F-62 7y ago
You forgot image maps! For the younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map

username3 7y ago

Sitemaps or screenreaders.txt

userbinator 7y ago

Using a website that seems to be focused on video content as a demonstration of (in)accessibility for the blind seems a little unusual... perhaps something like a news site --- which has lots of textual content --- would make a better example.

juanuys 7y ago
A blind person browsing a video site does not necessarily mean they want to watch the videos. They might want to listen to the audio, or share the video links they find.
nkrisc 7y ago
People who use screenreaders aren't necessarily completely blind. Maybe they want to watch videos but have a vision impairment that makes reading the text on the site difficult, thus use a screenreader. People use screenreaders for many different reasons.

GrumpyNl 7y ago

He did pick one of the worst sites. The whole site is a design disaster with lots of times not working vids.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pliuchkin 7y ago

"Toggle Accessibility" button forwarding to a clean page.

blowski 7y ago

In my experience, many websites are an extension of their CEO's ego. They don't have the money to build a website that is both unique and usable, but there's no way they want to look everyone else - so they drop the requirement to be usable. They're the same people that drive impractical cars, because they look flashy.

tyfon 7y ago
That wouldn't fly where I live, there are a set of rules to make sure the website can be used by anyone and a company can be fined for breaking too many of the guidelines[1]. It's called "universal design" (or universell utforming in Norwegian) It's not like they hunt webpages that are breaking the law, but since I have carpal tunnel syndrome excessive scrolling is painful and I've been able to make a few local webpages change just by emailing them with the guidelines. The government even provides a test-suite [2] for your web page. I've seen plenty of the pages you mention that could use a touch of this :) [1] https://uu.difi.no/om-oss/english https://uu.difi.no/om-oss/english [2] https://uu.difi.no/krav-og-regelverk/testprosedyrar-nettstader https://uu.difi.no/krav-og-regelverk/testprosedyrar-nettstad... (Norwegian)
sli 7y ago
Yep. CEO of our company didn't like the progress on one of our frontends, so he took a weekend to write a whole new one himself, claiming it was "almost done." It was, as you may predict, nowhere near done, but still shoved into Git and became the new frontend. In reality he seemed offended that he didn't know much about how we (the frontend team) built it and he didn't like that, so he built the way he thinks he knows, which turned out to just be a hodge podge of code from various tutorials and no singular vision for how the application functions. There are no less than three different paradigms in use in this codebase, and none of them really play well together. The end result is that it took us nearly as long as it took us to develop the first version to bring the second version up to feature parity, but now we have a giant mess of a codebase that was very strictly written to do exactly the things the CEO wrote it to do. Predictably, development slowed to a crawl pretty quickly because we're essentially forced to rewrite every single individual piece that needs touching. I told them this was a bad idea and would only make things take far, far longer than finishing the one we had. The whole reason this was done? The CEO and CTO found some bugs but didn't want to file them on the issue tracker. They decided it was better that the CEO write his own, despite the CEO having exactly zero experience with frontend development. This is just one of a long line of bizarre decisions that I have accurately predicted would only cost us more time and money than is worth it. We're currently looking for new jobs.

michaelbuckbee 7y ago

Here is a two-fold win: use the Vimium extension for navigating the web. It lets you navigate web pages via keyboard shortcuts much faster than a mouse. Also, it readily exposes issues of non compliant links and navigation elements that would also be missed by a screen reader.

nessunodoro 7y ago
Shout out to one of my favorite projects, Luakit [^], the only chromeless browser that lets me resize the window to a single pixel. Best part is the vim interface, :open hacker news [ddg results] /Hack Enter :tabopen github top lua questions [Github search results] :bookmark ^ https://github.com/luakit/luakit https://github.com/luakit/luakit

Causality1 7y ago

The same layout is not going to work best for both sighted and impaired people. Attention spans are short and sight has an order of magnitude more information bandwidth than hearing.

nate 7y ago

Reminded me of a quote from Paul Arden: "All creative people need something to rebel against." It's why things were simple and easy to understand in 1999. But then we all rebelled making it more sophisticated and complicated on purpose. And then now we all want to rebel against what we've done. The pendulum swings and swings. I do prefer the 1999 version myself :)