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Top Web Design Mistakes of 1999
- themoonbus 12y agoWebsites: breaking my back button for 15 years.
- kbar13 12y agowhat about text as images? https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/
- CanSpice 12y agoThe images there all have ALT tags, so that should be okay. Images comprising only text is (obviously) more bandwidth-heavy, though, so that could be seen as a bit of a mistake. It's not a design mistake though, it's more of a "care about your users" mistake.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoNo excuse for this now we have webfonts.
- marban 12y agoOnly if you don't care about anti-aliasing. edit: ...and Kerning, text-flow, font-weight, character maps and other gripes.
- Retr0spectrum 12y agoSurely webfonts allow for better anti-aliasing (with sub-pixel rendering), whereas images can only guess how the sub-pixels on your monitor are arranged.
- jdcantrell 12y agoNot always. Different operating systems and browser combos have different ways of rendering fonts. I've seen fonts that look good in OSX in Firefox look poorly in Windows with Firefox (Gentium in my case). Also these images look like they used gray scale instead of sub-pixel rendering so the differences in pixel geometry should be more or less mitigated. I'm sure in theory it could look better as actual text for certain setups, but this probably allows them to get the best looking text in the widest amount of configurations.
- colanderman 12y agoImages can be rendered at the subpixel level if they are oversampled (e.g. "retina" image on a non-retina screen). Browsers just don't.
- prewett 12y agoDepending on what country you live in, web fonts can be really annoying. Anything with a web font takes forever to load in China unless you are using a VPN, and either way, it's pretty much an extra round-trip you have to wait for.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoHate this with my whole heart. It kills the ability to copy-paste text, or even to mark parts of it (I do that somewhat impulsively while reading; helps with focus and not losing the place you were looking at).
- chadgeidel 12y agoAgreed. I just discovered this add-in to select text out of images: http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/ It's currently Chrome-only unfortunately.
- ekianjo 12y agoAnd sites which prevent to select text and disable the right mouse button or stuff like that. Heretics!
- supercoder 12y agoI think this can be forgivable when you want to render text perfectly. I tend to use text as images for logo fonts and banner fonts where you want to ensure the client doesn't render it in some weird way.
- United857 12y agoPlus ça change...
- bttf 12y agoThis article has enlightened me about opening browser new windows. Forgive me father, for I have sinned.
- bitJericho 12y agoThis was all the rage before popup blockers and tabs!
- bitJericho 12y ago"appropriate behavior of these design elements is defined in the Windows Vista User Experience standard" This isn't from 1999. Something's amiss...
- dredmorbius 12y agoMuch of it is, though it seems Nielsen's revised this at least somewhat. Hrm... As notahacker notes, the original text is on the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20000302210201/http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000302210201/http://www.useit.c... Text: "The appropriate behavior of these design elements is defined in the Windows UI standard, the Macintosh UI standard, and the Java UI standard." I suspect some sort of search-and-replace.
- notahacker 12y agoHere's the original http://web.archive.org/web/20000815063033/http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000815063033/http://www.useit.c... In fairness, apart from removing dead links to Amazon books on the likes of Win 98 UI guidelines (probably not a big seller any more) and adding in a handful of internal links to slightly more recent iarticles, it's pretty much untouched. Talk about evergreen content...
- ssmoot 12y agoOn a related note: It's amazing how miserable many popular "mobile first" "hip/modern" sites are to actually use on a mobile data connection/latency. The modern web may be pretty, but it feels like general usability it at a low point.
- dubfan 12y agoAnd the related phenomenon that I've seen more of recently: layouts that try to be mobile friendly, but then have some giant horizontal element sticking way out and ruining the experience.
- ekianjo 12y ago> some giant horizontal element sticking way out and ruining the experience And more often than not, this giant horizontal element refuses to scroll down properly and makes the whole page sluggish like hell. You gotta love 2014.
- lmm 12y agoNah, mobile has forced some level of sanity on us, and flat has curbed some of the worst design excesses. The 2008 web was worse for usability (though the 2003 web was probably better).
- gone35 12y agoInteresting viewpoint. Can you provide any examples of 2008 sites that you think were "worse for usability" than their 2014 counterparts? I cannot think of any myself, but I'm happy to be proved wrong.
- lmm 12y agomicrosoft.com. My bank's website (Halifax). I think Yahoo and Livejournal, though I can't get either to work in the wayback machine to be sure. The content is fairly front and center now, where the 2008 trend was very "boxes in boxes" with lots of rounded corners to show you could. I'm actually struggling to remember what was big in 2008 - I remember Amazon and Ebay kept to a 2003-style design.
- awestley 12y agoI don't know if I should praise the author's insight or scorn the rest of the world for not moving beyond these mistakes. I'm just kidding... I know scorn is the right option.
- mVChr 12y agoMaybe because we live in a world where Jakob Nielsen[1] is referred to by the generic "the author." Not a good sign. No scorn directed at you, just making a point that his myriad work should be ingrained into anyone building for the web. [1] http://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/ http://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/
- x1798DE 12y agoThe picture in that link has the strangest quality - he looks like he's a young person that has undergone some Hollywood makeup magic to make him look older. Maybe it's something about the light or his skin or something that makes my brain assume that someone just dyed a young person's hair grey. Very strange.
- marban 12y agoMinor addition for 2014: 11) Breaking the scroll behaviour
- dredmorbius 12y agoScrollbar modifications is a growing gripe of mine. Even minor stuff. G+, for example, defaults (or defaulted to) to an exceptionally narrow scrollbar, a conspicuous violation of Fitts' law: make your UI control widgets as large as possible to allow for easy access. I can only surmise that a designer was using Mac OS or another platform in which gesture / multi-touch controls worked around the need for scrollbar access. With a touchpad-disabled, TrackPoint-equipped, mouseless laptop, this was a frequent frustration.
- marban 12y agoAlso happens the other way round - just try to scroll at e.g. http://store.y-3.com http://store.y-3.com with a Magic Mouse/Trackpad — Basically impossible since you'll hit the page end just by touching the mouse.
- dredmorbius 12y agoDon't get me started on sites that hijack l/r arrows to navigate between pages on the site rather than align text on page. Fucking NY Times.
- rtpg 12y agoThere are so many mobile sites that have broken scrolling until the entire page is loaded, I almost invariably think Chrome crashed or something until I realise that it's some news site (it is always news websites that have this issue) and its JS. Even funner are pages where scrolling stops working entirely when the page is fully loaded. As in, I can no longer read the article or zoom. So I have to refresh the page and hit the "stop" button before it finishes loading too much (but enough to have the text on the screen).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 12y agoI've said it before, I'll say it again: it's time to divorce the present browser into several different regimes: • A reading app. Styled on ePub readers, services such as Readability / Instapaper / Pocket, or bibliographic tools (which serve to manage content for searchability client-side). Inclusive of forums-oriented software and feed-reading. • An applications platform. Preferably with a consistent set of widgets (one of the key failures of present Web design). • An e-commerce platform, with payment and security features integrated. • Free-standing media playback tools (already substantively extant). http://redd.it/256lxu http://redd.it/256lxu Web design is not the solution. Web design is the problem. If I could have a tool to 1) remove all styling from a site, 2) reduce it to fundamental semantic markup (and here the HTML5 standard actually does provide a solid framework), and 3) apply my own preferred settings (fonts, margins, font-size, foreground/background colors) to every damned page, with minimal styling allowed, I'd be far happier.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 12y ago99.9966% of designers give the other 0.0034% a bad name.
- dredmorbius 12y agoAnd to come to the defense of designers: it's very often the clients who are insisting on idiotic features, yes, I know. Still doesn't get around the issue that it's design that's the problem.
- cr3ative 12y agoGenuine question: what do you think of FROGANS? https://www.frogans.org/en/main.html https://www.frogans.org/en/main.html
- dredmorbius 12y ago
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoRegarding #5 "Lack of Archives," it seems like most modern sites commit a sin that's nearly as bad: lack of reachable archives. At some point the Web collectively decided that The Blog was the one true format for information delivery, and now everything is presented backwards and you need to click "previous" a hundred million times to see last year's posts. It's especially maddening when people try to use sites like Tumblr for webcomics and serial fiction.
- thatthatis 12y agoTumblr is an interesting case of optimizing for content creator experience and seriously neglecting many blatant issues with content consumer experience
- chimeracoder 12y agoAlmost all of this is still relevant today, except for one part: > 2. Opening New Browser Windows > Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself! Nowadays, the bigger problem is on-page modal windows. Current operating systems now have very good window management, and browsers have zero window management, except for the ability to block popup windows[0]. I get very annoyed by websites that break my ability to open links in multiple tabs/windows by right-clicking, or force me to use their built-in modal windows as a substitute for popups. Most modern Google properties are culprits of this. For example: if you have a website with Google Apps for Business, it is impossible to open most links in new tabs - they force you to use the on-page navigation instead. The only solution is to open a second tab and navigate to the same location. We became so afraid of popup windows that we've swung too far in the other direction, and are suffering the consequences. [0] The solution is not to create a window manager for the browser, by the way.
- dredmorbius 12y agoAny breaking of user-specified window management is bad. Producing pop-ups or new windows/tabs when not requested, or preventing them. The key isn't what the site is doing, it is going against the user's expectations and/or express preferences.
- chimeracoder 12y ago> Producing pop-ups or new windows/tabs when not requested, or preventing them. Agreed - the common pattern I'm referring to is to have a button that the user clicks on to open a modal window. This is ridiculously frustrating - it obscures the rest of the page, preventing me from navigating around that page or to other parts of the site without manually opening a new tab. Occasionally those modal windows let me drag them around slowly with my mouse, but that's really only marginally better. I don't want every website to try and invent its own windowing manager, which is what many try to do.
- malkia 12y agoIf only the web stayed declarative...
- jakejake 12y agoIt's interesting to read that, aside from actual design "mistakes" this article also includes some, I would say, etiquette based suggestions which seem innocence/naive in hindsight. It wasn't too much earlier than this that registering a domain name carried some sort of responsibility to create site that was appropriate for it. Boy, those days are definitely long gone! Not using link-bait titles, always including a biography,not jumping on buzzwords, etc. This is definitely still fine advice for a quality site. At the time I certainly didn't image the future web would be cluttered with sites doing absolutely anything and everything possible to get clicks and views.
- gl 12y ago4. Lack of Biographies "My first Web studies in 1994 showed that users want to know the people behind information on the Web." My first Web studies in 1994: Internet Access 1. Log into Ralph. At the % prompt, type the following: telnet FSCAT.OCLC.ORG and press Return or Enter. FirstSearch responds “You are connected to OCLC Online Reference Services. Enter your authorization.” 2. Enter your FirstSearch authorization number and press Return or Enter. FirstSearch responds, “Enter your password.” 3. Enter your FirstSearch user password and press Return. FirstSearch responds, “Welcome to FirstSearch.” Follow the menus to search any database. 4. Use BYE to log off FirstSearch. Just enter bye and press Enter or Return. FirstSearch asks, “Are you ready to disconnect?” 5. Enter y for yes and press Enter or Return. FirstSearch responds, “You are disconnected.” 6. Disconnect from the Internet using the instructions on your screen.
- leorocky 12y agoNot using labels with radio and checkbox input elements could be on that list again.
- zobzu 12y agoA lot of them are still valid.
- euske 12y agoI tend to see the past 10 years or so of the Web as a great irony for accessibility. It looked like finally a gospel to blind users who could get a nicely structured textual information. In reality, so many websites are simply broken to them with Flash and prevalent DOM manipulation. And every time something good happens (like use of CSS to separate content), something horrible is newly introduced or abused on the other side of the planet.
- jimmaswell 12y agoThe mailto one is invalid. There's nothing wrong or unexpected about URLs having different URI schemes than http or https. In fact you can configure the browser to send mailto: links to your email website instead of launching an application.
- masterzora 12y agoThere's nothing wrong with linking different schemes as long as the user is expecting it. Most users click links without first examining the URL and the default assumption is that a link points to another page. If you say "click here to email me" or if the link text is an email address or whatever then, yeah, they'll expect a mailto. But if you don't get specific indicators like that, the user will tend to be surprised when their email is suddenly opening, especially if this involves opening Outlook or such, and it's not a good experience to unexpectedly be looking at the "compose new email" window.