6 ms·

Web designs are getting too complicated

99 points by parkcedar 1y ago

andsoitis 1y ago
”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”
- ehnto 1y ago
  And so little is delivered with the 2.5mb. Worrying more that so much traffic is bot traffic, and bloating sites becomes significantly wasted resources.
  - mediumsmart 1y ago
    I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has. complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  I'm starting to think that lightweight framework for web apps might be a wasm-dos-win3.11 or wasm-wince target.
k310 1y ago
Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  In using brave (username checks out)
- pmontra 1y ago
  Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
  - k310 1y ago
    Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
    - pmontra 1y ago
      No worries. By the way, I noticed right now that Reader Mode is available in this page for desktop Firefox but not for Android FF.
- andirk 1y ago
  I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.
throwaway81523 1y ago
In other news, water is wet.
bravesoul2 1y ago
Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?
- Arainach 1y ago
  My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design. This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
    - Arainach 1y ago
      Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
- cyberax 1y ago
  This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps. Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder... And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.
locallost 1y ago
> Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem. I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either. But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.
chrismorgan 1y ago
Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting. Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites. I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article. Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.
- cupofjoakim 1y ago
  > Awwwards is not representative of the web at large 100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times. It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
- arajnoha 1y ago
  thats why i always choose dribbble as a go-to for a nice looking yet not "award winning" stuff
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  [dead]
- potato-peeler 1y ago
  It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site. Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.
jameslk 1y ago
Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3]. 0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte... 1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics 2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript 3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280-aa0b-5f3f0cd3d2be/page/M6ZPC https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated". The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous. Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables. If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true: 1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use and 2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
  - jameslk 1y ago
    Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats: > Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales. In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight). The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
neepi 1y ago
So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email. I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside. As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit. Perhaps it's the people?
- shoeb00m 1y ago
  Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
  - neepi 1y ago
    They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it. The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes. There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
    - jiggawatts 1y ago
      "You see, I have this hammer." "I need a screw driven." "Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
    - shoeb00m 1y ago
      Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs
      - neepi 1y ago
        That is precisely my point.
neya 1y ago
I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings. Just a sad state of affairs overall.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
  - agumonkey 1y ago
    I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
  - wtetzner 1y ago
    I'm curious about which flows you mean.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- andirk 1y ago
  Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
  - neya 1y ago
andirk 1y ago
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s. Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
- gloxkiqcza 1y ago
  Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
  - CommenterPerson 1y ago
    One reason I always refuse to get Apps and get pulled into the surveillance world.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Reddit is one of those sad stories where some features are now only available on the mobile app and the endpoints on their API are not documented so you can't access them any other way.
nilirl 1y ago
This is an unkind argument. There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving. In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.
Loganzz 1y ago
[dead]
graic 1y ago
The irony of complaining about over designed sites only to have a hidden form be revealed from the bottom of the page. > The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery. websites are art
- devrandoom 1y ago
  Websites aren't art. They can be, just like this comment can be art. Especially if I add a fancy made up word to it. Forthedolomaznia.
FinnLobsien 1y ago
Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching. I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.
jfernandezr 1y ago
I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks. It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ unironically
nness 1y ago
This brings me back to the days of Flash-based websites...
excitor 1y ago
[dead]
demarq 1y ago
I laughed when I saw the footer
donatj 1y ago
I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.
librasteve 1y ago
turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Making server requests for every interaction is the least grug way of serving html
  - librasteve 1y ago
    we’re gonna have to agree to differ on that one …
rpgbr 1y ago
The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
- adregan 1y ago
  > The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I don’t know about you, but I’m not running flash like it’s the early 2000s.
- dentemple 1y ago
  I, for one, am happy that I'm no longer managing state across hundreds of independent jQuery values and making raw XHR calls to jsonp endpoints.
- bufferoverflow 1y ago
  I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM. Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
binary132 1y ago
I feel like this article is bait for web designers to get defensive about and self-identify as bloatlords.
CommenterPerson 1y ago
A thousand times yes. One word: " Enshittification" captures what has become of the web.
afavour 1y ago
There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive. I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.
rchaud 1y ago
Websites today exist to sell things. Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites. There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.

99 points by parkcedar 1y ago

”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”

ehnto 1y ago
And so little is delivered with the 2.5mb. Worrying more that so much traffic is bot traffic, and bloating sites becomes significantly wasted resources.
- mediumsmart 1y ago
  I just rewrote a wordpress site made 7 years ago for a client as a static site. Replaced the index.html 4 image parallax with a 3 image css slider (mobile, desktop versions) and added 5 languages for the 5 pages the site has. complete website now weighs 15.9 MB - 14.5 MB is images (395 including responsive versions plus fallback twin). The index page now has a total of 558KB while the same page in the old WP site clocks 21MB - (5.7MB for the 4 images) which it loads in steps 8MB - then 17MB and jumping to final 21MB when I move the cursor from the reload button over to the page.
palmfacehn 1y ago
I'm starting to think that lightweight framework for web apps might be a wasm-dos-win3.11 or wasm-wince target.

k310 1y ago

Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.

bravesoul2 1y ago
In using brave (username checks out)
pmontra 1y ago
Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
- k310 1y ago
  Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
  - pmontra 1y ago
    No worries. By the way, I noticed right now that Reader Mode is available in this page for desktop Firefox but not for Android FF.
andirk 1y ago
I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.

throwaway81523 1y ago

In other news, water is wet.

bravesoul2 1y ago

Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?

Arainach 1y ago
My experience is that CTOs don't care about animations, rounded corners, or what not - they care about metrics. These artsy bullshit layouts are suggested by design teams and the technical side either doesn't care/is content to delegate or there's someone at director level who wants to be the next Steve Jobs and empowers design. This isn't to say that all design is bad - good design is hard and most software engineers are really bad at it and undervalue its impact on users - but if you blindly trust design you can end up with garbage like what this article talks about.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  It's so funny to see an incompetent CTO thinking things like, as the example, animations, is just designers being designers. Go ahead and remove ChatGPT animations and make the user wait for the whole text to be ready without any feedback. Let me know how those metrics go.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    Animations are not necessarily bullshit, but all of the sites in the linked list of rewards are. Sites which hijack scroll to do something else ("you scrolled down and watch the window in this picture of a house open up and reveal the next text block") are an example of something in vogue amongst designers which are harder to read, harder to navigate, and are just artsy bullshit.
cyberax 1y ago
This CTO is bugging designers to not do anything moving and insisted on adding a "no animation" mode to our apps. Yet, our designers still insist on adding "bling" to webpages. I'll try harder... And I've seen similar attitudes in other CTOs, it's mostly marketing/product guys who end up being responsible for the animations. They tend to be far less technical.

locallost 1y ago

> Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem. I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either. But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.

chrismorgan 1y ago

Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting. Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites. I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article. Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.

cupofjoakim 1y ago
> Awwwards is not representative of the web at large 100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times. It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
arajnoha 1y ago
thats why i always choose dribbble as a go-to for a nice looking yet not "award winning" stuff
bigbuppo 1y ago
[dead]
potato-peeler 1y ago
It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site. Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.

jameslk 1y ago

Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3]. 0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matter.html https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte... 1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics 2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript 3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280-aa0b-5f3f0cd3d2be/page/M6ZPC https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...

lelanthran 1y ago
> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1]. I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated". The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous. Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables. If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true: 1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use and 2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
- jameslk 1y ago
  Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats: > Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales. In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight). The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world

neepi 1y ago

So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email. I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside. As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit. Perhaps it's the people?

shoeb00m 1y ago
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
- neepi 1y ago
  They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it. The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes. There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    "You see, I have this hammer." "I need a screw driven." "Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
  - shoeb00m 1y ago
    Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs
    - neepi 1y ago
      That is precisely my point.

neya 1y ago

I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings. Just a sad state of affairs overall.

tokioyoyo 1y ago
Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
- agumonkey 1y ago
  I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
- wtetzner 1y ago
  I'm curious about which flows you mean.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
andirk 1y ago
Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
- neya 1y ago

andirk 1y ago

Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s. Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.

gloxkiqcza 1y ago
Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
- CommenterPerson 1y ago
  One reason I always refuse to get Apps and get pulled into the surveillance world.
qingcharles 1y ago
Reddit is one of those sad stories where some features are now only available on the mobile app and the endpoints on their API are not documented so you can't access them any other way.

nilirl 1y ago

This is an unkind argument. There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving. In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.

Loganzz 1y ago

[dead]

graic 1y ago

The irony of complaining about over designed sites only to have a hidden form be revealed from the bottom of the page. > The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery. websites are art

devrandoom 1y ago
Websites aren't art. They can be, just like this comment can be art. Especially if I add a fancy made up word to it. Forthedolomaznia.

FinnLobsien 1y ago

Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching. I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.

jfernandezr 1y ago

I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks. It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ unironically

nness 1y ago

This brings me back to the days of Flash-based websites...

excitor 1y ago

[dead]

demarq 1y ago

I laughed when I saw the footer

donatj 1y ago

I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.

librasteve 1y ago

turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away

owebmaster 1y ago
Making server requests for every interaction is the least grug way of serving html
- librasteve 1y ago
  we’re gonna have to agree to differ on that one …

rpgbr 1y ago

The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.

adregan 1y ago
> The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine! I don’t know about you, but I’m not running flash like it’s the early 2000s.
dentemple 1y ago
I, for one, am happy that I'm no longer managing state across hundreds of independent jQuery values and making raw XHR calls to jsonp endpoints.
bufferoverflow 1y ago
I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM. Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.

binary132 1y ago

I feel like this article is bait for web designers to get defensive about and self-identify as bloatlords.

CommenterPerson 1y ago

A thousand times yes. One word: " Enshittification" captures what has become of the web.

afavour 1y ago

There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive. I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.

rchaud 1y ago

Websites today exist to sell things. Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites. There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.