Jeffrey Veen

I was a judge for the Webbys this year and noticed the same thing. As much as some of us are pushing forward with user-centered design and the like, there are still many, many people out there who are being left behind for whatever reason.

As SXSW this year, in the Flash vs. HTML panel (not sure if you caught that) there was an example of a Flash version of gmail. It was impressive, but...

One of the "features" was the ability to drag things around from pane to pane. When part of it was shown in one instance, my whole row groaned. It was painfully obvious that it would have been much easier to simply click the photo (or whatever it was) than to now drag and target.

But hey, I guess the effect was cooler?

Thanks for speaking your mind here. I totally agree with the loading, self assembling, and sound comments. I get so annoyed when I have to tear my headphones off my head 2 or 3 times a day because I accidentally stumbled upon a "hip" site or when I have to sit through a 20 second loading screen.

For the past eight years, I've been working at a post-secondary arts institution in Canada. We have a number of residencies each year where our small interactive media team collaborates with multi-disciplinary artists from around the world. A trend I've noticed in the past year, which may also be related to this, is the insatiable interest in DIY video editing / compositing by almost all artists regardless of which medium they traditionally have worked in. We have had to change an entire computer lab due to the almost across-the-board interest in this.

How does this relate to the web? Almost all of these artists eventually request a direct online translation of their video work from us, but in flash. The want cuts/transitions/etc at the same speed, tempo and feeling as their video work. It really has become a challenge between functionality/usability (which is what I usually try to argue) and their perception of pushing online boundaries, which seems to always mean using flash.

It's the age old question of who is doing interaction design, a designer or a usability-centric designer?

I recently have gotten into building 508 compliant sites and this has definitely caused me to see how useless (although goodlooking) Flash splashes/intros/builds can be.

I've worked in interactive design for nearly 10 years. I have these same arguments with good designers and art directors who just don't understand how the web works, what usability is all about, or why it matters. They don't understand what they think is 'cool' is simply poor design.

Unfortunately, there are more and more graphic designers and art directors who are designing for the web without the experience, knowledge or understanding of the medium. They try and adapt their broadcast ideas, or their print ideas to fit. They are simply ignorant when it comes to usablity and HI design.

Time may solve the problem, but I don't think it will. The web is very mature from what it was only a few years ago. However, UI has been around for decades. Until the interactive/advertising industry recognizes that good usablity design is more effective in communicating, and that specialists are needed to develop and design for usablity, nothings going to change.

Clients will drive the change as they become more educated and demand their web-based communications work.

On the other hand, we should remember, it IS advertising. Since when has advertising been useful? And since when has a designer in an ad agency been at the center of good design?

-b

Mike:

"who is doing interaction design, a designer or a usability-centric designer?"

I honestly believe there is no difference. And I've come to understand I'm in the minority.

Bill:

"On the other hand, we should remember, it IS advertising. Since when has advertising been useful?"

Pretend you're going to buy a car. Visit the auto-maker's sites. See if it's even possible to make your decision based on what you find there.

I hear your pain. What you've mentioned are poor design choices, but you also have to consider the target audience.

Is the camera site showing sexy people carrying low-cost cameras targeted to teens with low-paying jobs who just have to have the look rather than the quality? Consider the iPod Shuffle. You don't need to market that product with deep content. For one, it's cheap (compared to other iPods) and users don't really need to read review upon review.

Your car web site example has holes...because people don't make their final decisions to purchase cars based on web sites (if the do, they're stupid and they shouldn't). Should they provide deep content? Absolutely. But chances are, users are going to the site to look at photos, options, colors....and to avoid those seedy salesmen. And the majority of people are not going to the sites to be helped in filtering down from a lot of cars to the single car with the options they want (e.g. show me all cars with heated seats, 4 cylinders, and a power sunroof). Most have the exact car in mind and the specs are somewhat superfluous.

We've talked about this, but for everyone else: Flashy, formulaic solutions that we don't understand as user-centered designers win awards in design publications because that's what sells magazines, and therefore, what attracts advertisers. Design magazines could take a stance editorially and suggest criteria that favor user-centered solutions, but they won't because traditional design shops and agencies who buy these publications want to see Flashy, formulaic designs. They want to see eye candy because that's what sells. It's unfortunate to me, then, that what this small design community thinks is good or timely ends up being the "good design" benchmark for the rest of the world because of the stature of the publications who host the awards. It ends up being a vicious cycle.

Jeff,

I was being a bit sarcastic. You are in the minority. Designers in ad agencies aren't preparred or trained to think. They are rushed through portfolio schools or university programs that focus mostly on the superficial aspects of design. I nearly went through one of these until I wised up and studied anthropology instead.

Today there are too many designers out there without an understanding of what it is they are trying to accomplish. Most focus on aesthetics and forget design actually serves a purpose. Others are interested in what is going to win an award, the pizazz and fluff, rather than useful, effective, helpful information.

Spiekerman, Mok, Wurman, Vignelli, Norman, Tufte, and hey...Veen... there is truly a short list of designers who have done revolutionary things.
-b

"They read like a summary of web design in 1997."

You've hit the nail right on the friggin' head. Still so many annoying and clunky sites with flying gradient spheres and their terrible ilk. Every single time I encounter one of these sites that you describe here (unfortunately, these encounters take place far too often), I close the browser window immediately. I can't imagine that many have the patience or time to wade through such impossible experiments in "interaction."

Great article.

I am in total agreement with your list of annoying trends, especially the music thing. The internet can be used to download music and movies, but don't bombard me with sound when I arrive at your index page (that's still loading because it's only a splash page).

I think where these reputable firms will fail is in the degradability of their product. As cell phone adoption is nearing an almost worldly saturation point, and other handheld media are gaining critical mass, these candy-coated sites that are designed much like the pre-standards (table markup and proprietary code) days will show for what they truly are: one-dimensional. Clients and DM's will soon begin noticing that their site content, though perfectly rendered in IE and Firefox, can't even be dialed in from a basic cell phone browsing service. When they see that a competitor site can be, many of these firms that produced these hollow designs will be SOL. It takes guys like Mike Davidson to recognize a good visual use for Flash (sIFR) that can still produce a usuable design in a non-Flash environment. I think that the days of a 'designing merely for the Web' mentality are fast coming to an end. In other words, you shouldn't have to find yourself sifting through so much crap in an 'interactive' Web design contest in the near future (*hopefully*).

Thank you so much for posting this. Your comment about the design magazine ecosystem is so dead on. Largely, this is also a problem with AIGA (not completely) with so much effort spent on designing for the Web like it is print or film, which it is not as it is its own medium with its own capabilities and uses.

I don't know how many times I get Flash (it could be any "rich interface") that poorly executed and the wrong choices were made for the presentation layer. I complain, the customer complains, but it is not until we test it with users that the utter failure is clear. The designer only takes away from this the users are stupid and he/she is only wasting their time designing for them. They should be learning they made art (if it has any redeeming artistic value - most do not) as it is not functional. Nearly all of the designers point to "award winning" designs that they used as inspirations.

Part of the designer's toolbelt should be the means to decipher the right tool for the task at hand. It is rare to find a digital designer that has mastered more than one interface design layer tool (Flash, graphics, HTML/CSS, etc), if that. Flickr is one site that kicks the cover off the ball as they really get the interface right, but this is so so rare.

One site that really seems to get the Web is the Chevrolet redesign this past year. I can use their site, for the most part, on a car lot, where the information begins to make some situated sense. I can not think of any other car company coming close. Chevrolet kept the beauty that is part of the automotive company site genre, but made the site fast and functional.

It's so refreshing to hear other people speak this way regarding the sad state of interactive design. Most of the time I think it can be put down to lack of experience.

After being in the industry for over a decade I cringe everytime I meet yet another 22 year old 'creative director' who just graduated from a 1 year programme. Maybe some talent, no experience and a whole lotta responsibility.

Pete McBreen recently wrote a book about software as craft (http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/SoftwareCraftsmanship/) - I sometimes wonder if adopting a craftsmanship approach to interactive design wouldn't raise the overall quality of work being produced? Allowing future designers not to make the same mistakes as their predecessors, and encourage good designers to stay designers and not move into management.

Thank you Jeff for those refreshing comments. An overriding problem that bugs all of this sad stuff is obssession with web as the only channel, stand-alone, and transactionally one-trip-then-buy. This is wholly wrong. People/users/customers have lives and contexts and engage with many channels and go to the web for information as one of many sources.

My one-liner advice is forget desiging 'web-by-itself' think designing 'experiences-in-life-context' ... and then go back to designing the web with this in mind. I had hoped we'd moved on, at least conceptually, but seems not.

David

Veen:

In my experience, i've worked with traditional graphic artists who have learned flash, then applied all their creative expertise and try and do interactive design.

It's really aplitting hairs when you also have someone who has focused more on IA/Interaction and application-based design.

I can always tell when something was designed by a designer.

Funny.

I'm curious about the results of the contest. Where is it published?

This is related to an issue I've pointed out a couple of times regarding the SXSW Web Awards. [Click my name.]

It annoys me that good speakers like yourself dominate the panels, telling us how to build great web experiences, while the awards go to sites that operate on very different principles.

I think you guys are all right, but, at the end of the day, it is those sites that you guys all hate so much that are bringing precious media coverage to the internet. Sites like subservient chicken (that was featured on every major news feed in america) might have not been designed with all the standards you talk about in mind. In fact it WAS designed by ad agency art directors and creative directors and im sure usability and standards was not what they were thinking about.They wanted to make something different on the web, and sometimes to do that you have to break some rules. Although being an every day interent user myself i agree with 95% of what your saying here. But also being an someone who works at an Advertising agency doing interactive work, I really think were trying to push the envelope. Might not be an accepted thing but at some point in time someone has to dare to be different. And maybe one day someone will come up with something that we will use as the web standards for the future.

Thanks for your time, and the forum to express my opinions.

The contest results won't be published for a few months. In fact, I don't even know the winners -- the judges voted blind in the last round.

I'll post a link when it comes around.

In a lot of ways I'm reminded of what I've read about early television broadcast history - that TV then was really nothing more than a radio with pictures. It took many years for television to come in its own, but it did.

I think that's a large part of what the web (and the Internet as a whole, really) is experiencing. There isn't the innate understanding yet that the web is the web. It's still a radio with pictures in a lot of people's minds. As technologies mature and more people grasp that understanding, I think we'll see a shift from the "radio with pictures" paradigm. Once that happens, "traditional" designers will be forced to deal with the web on its own terms (or just quit trying).

That still doesn't mean it's any less frustrating for those who work in web now. We're trying to find our footing while surrounded by "professionals" who don't grok the medium and charlatans who pass off their sub-standard work as above-average. Standards aren't well supported or well understood, and the baseline for what is "good" hasn't been established. There's very little professional support outside the informal blogging community; no serious professional organizations, no formal educators. Unless we're lucky, we find ourselves isolated, surrounded by people who don't get it.

I guess I've been pretty disheartened lately, and your post touched on why. It's not that designers are creating web sites circa 1997 - it's that it's still *acceptable* to create web sites circa 1997. That's extraordinarily discouraging. It makes me feel like my skills are less valid because my "contemporaries" are still using HTML 3.2 and tables. I keep reminding myself that one day the web won't be "radio with pictures," but even now it feels a long way away.

Congratulations, right on! Keep up the good analysis to focus on what is really important for web designed interaction.

I recently ended my subscription to Communication Arts magazine because the Interactive Annual was filled with exactly the sort of slick, overproduced junk Jeff describes.

I realized that I get more inspiration out of sites like zeldman.com, alistapart.com and stopdesign.com than I do CA.

"Of all the consumer electronics sites I evaluated, for example, not one compared to sites like dpreview.com"

Wow, just took a look at that site and must say i am not all that impressed. Jeff, it is easy to slam Flash and point out everything that sux, but i'd find it a lot more helpful and legitimate if you would back it up with examples of sites that do everything that you are so convinced none of the entries you judged did. Is dpreview.com that example? Just because a site follows navigational standards set back in 94 which most users are very used to looking at does not mean that all of entries to said competition should take the same approach.

Personally I appreciate it when contests feature sites that explore new terrain even if my mom finds it unfamiliar territory. Were you judging sites that met the lowest common denominator or sites that have something new to share. I guess we will find out once your “winners” are featured in the magazine. :)

"Wow, just took a look at that site and must say i am not all that impressed."

dpreview.com clearly and accurately anticipates the needs of it's audience, and helps the achieve the goal of selecting an appropriate product. This, I would argue, is the baseline for any site offering a consumer experience -- you *must* do this, and do it well, before you can even start to innovate with the user experience, visual design, architecture, or technology.

Of course dpreview.com isn't especially attractive. It's certainly not going to win any design awards, nor should it. But its functionality is the basis for my appreciation of the "goodness" of a design. This is the stuff that comes first, and most of the sites I evaluated completely missed it.

Personally, I'll take an ugly site that works perfectly over a pretty site I can't use.

Ugly sites that work being better than pretty but unusable sites is a point that has a few real world examples to recommend it.

Just think of Napster. That interface was pretty awful, but because it provided people with loads of free music nobody cared. Yahoo's interface is pretty un-pretty at this point, but there's enough good stuff there to warrant a lot of people using it every day.

Flickr is one site that uses Flash pretty well. Ofoto's Flash bits work pretty well, too. Common to both is using it as a task-oriented piece of a larger whole. Though I'd be happier if Flickr worked properly with the back button.

Since someone from CPB posted earlier, let me mention that the Mini USA site, all in Flash, is one of the best websites I've seen. There's a lot of good stuff in there, including a factory tour.

Anyway, all of this is the usual argument against the predominance of 'poor' design. Though we should remember that clients are signing off on this stuff and paying for it. We'll continue to have poorly designed websites as long as they do.

You really expressed my frustration nicely with this post. I'm going through a sort of judging of my own, and noticed the same thing. You see, I'm looking to hire a web designer who actually cares about usability. It's been REALLY frustrating so far. Too many people are so busy trying to be slick that they've forgotten about usability. If they've even thought about it...

Here's the types of portfolios that I've seen so far:

MR FLASHY: Hey! I love art! Hey! I know Flash! I'm kewl! (These are the sites that generate the same reaction you posted above)

REFLECTING POND: Looks pretty, but shallow. Portfolio basically consists of static content provided by client with pretty pictures or colors. Little understanding of hypertext.
Usually prefers tiny, fixed font.

IT'S MY DAY JOB: Here's some webpages I've done in the past. No, I don't care enough about website to have my own page.

I'M A CONSULTANT: Often understands web design. But since good design + good interface is so scarce, they've got so much business they're not interested in working fulltime at one company

A friend of mine the other day sent me some Flash intensive site the other day with some campy videos. Now I know the site's content didn't really warrant a "serious" design, but wading through essentially 3 splash pages before Firefox crashed was not my idea of entertainment.
I make an attempt at anticipating what the user might want not what the client or our CD who wants to always "wow them". I cringe everytime I'm requested to "make it look EXACTLY like the print brochure" or "can't you animate something?" Sometimes I feel as if people view my work as substandard because I don't have things wooshing about the screen, those are the same people though that don't really care about the end user and their needs. I tell people sounds and gimics won't sell more widget or let's keep the design lowkey so the content will stand out.

You should see the web design agencies that are put up on a pedestal in the Southern California scene, down here around my home town of San Diego and especially movie-centric LA to the north. Whether at user groups or AIGA meetings, it's still 2advanced this and DNA Studios that - just like 1997. Those kinds of places are held up as where designers aim to go if you really make it, and I admit the allure is very appealing - working with total rock stars, making fun stuff, getting paid well, the respect of your peers as a "real" designer - and there's definitely a market for what they make. Just don't ask if their creations actually serve the needs of their customers.

At least for the DNA Studios type of LA agency, there might be a rational reason for it - they're very tied into the movie website scene and those are big budget projects with short shelf lives. Most aren't aiming for a dpreview level of loyalty over the years, they just want to give a taste of what the movie is like and try to emulate the style of the flick itself. I think this relates to Ryan's experiences above - there's a lot of designers that don't understand the difference between being influenced by the film/tv/broadcast design mediums and directly imitating them.

My personal opinion is that good metrics (another whole discussion) will always prove what works and what is mere vanity in the guise of so-called interactivity, but we shouldn't have to get to crash-and-burn point to prove that. Sadly, even good corporate designers usually don't often have control over an ever-degrading design when there aren't signoffs or chargebacks to those who are making some of the more unfortunate decisions.

Thanks Jeff, your take is right on. I used to do photography for large ad agencies - they don't "get" that either. But the end blame belongs to the corporate clients who really don't get it.

Keith: Hi! I'm the author of the Flash/Flex Gmail you mentioned in your comment.

Was the drag and drop thing gratuitous? To a degree, but I'm also a Mac user and prefer to drag and drop objects around the screen, it makes sense to me.

Please also understand that I was asked to no only redesign Gmail (a huge feat) but to redesign Gmail in FLASH, something I'm not exactly a huge proponent of. I added drag and drop because, yes, I thought it would be neat, but it was also me trying to show how Flash can more emulate a desktop experience instead of the ways the HTML-based web has (historically) had to re-engineer the user experience away from a Desktop-based model. I was part of an interesting panel and I did my best with what I was assigned. Sue me.

(sorry to derail this excellent thread, Jeff.)

Jeff I couldn't agree more. I'm so tired of hitting sites like these when I want information and I have to wait..wait..wait.. for the designers whims before (if) I get anywhere.

The key is, these guys design for THEMSELVES, not for their audience. They're out to impress other designers and judges in contests, not serve the end user.

I'm so with you on the music thing - and why do they think everyone shares their taste in horrible music?

I keep thinking Flash is going to become part of the fabric of the web in a useful way (like Flickr) but it keeps not happening.

The only time a site like these ever makes sense are portfolio sites - and even then it gets annoying. Great post.

I've come to the point where I surf the web with my sound off. I only turn it on when I got to watch a video or something specific. There's way too many sites that interject audio into my experience when I don't want it there. The worse is ads that have audio.

But I think the real problem is clients. At my previous employment, our clients always wanted something flashy and eye catching. If we didn't do it for them, they'd go to one of our competitors.

I have to say I dislike punditry in all of its forms, and web designer punditry is no worse.

Complaints like those above are sort of like a radio programmer in the late fifties deriding television because it moves and twitches too much. As designers we need to consider the fact that maybe the nav doesn't have to go on the left. Maybe the content doesn't have to be in one big white DIV with "margin: auto". Of course there are interesting and ground breaking things to be done in traditional HTML/CSS. I try and do them everyday in my work. After all, simplicity is often beautiful. And hell, some examples are anything but simple. CSS Zen Garden anyone?

But Flash offers designers another set of tools to do novel things. It's one thing to say you don't like someones creation; it's yet another thing to hide behind broken browser functionality and standards non-compliance in lieu of just saying you don't care for it.

I applaud any designer fighting the "blogification" of in internet as a whole. How many drop shadowed DIVs and tiny horizontal line backgrounds are we to see before it starts to get really dull? How many H1's set in Georgia is too many?

By the way, the job of marketing is to apply lots and lots of gloss. Marketing departments aren't really tasked with helping you find a PDF of your fancy camera's manual; they're there to make you want something for some unspeakable reason. DPReview is in the business of putting a nice front end on a huge SQL database of camera reviews. This isn't Canon's job. Ack.

Sorry to unload, but the whole usability thing gets kind of old. I want people to be able to find what they need in the sites I build, obviously. But if I do this at the price of artistic merit I haven't done a good job. Inviting users to explore a bit makes for a memorable experience, and Flash along with non-traditional navigation systems are ways to do this. I guess it's true that sometimes we go overboard and forget about users' needs. But putting everything non-traditional under the heading of being ignorant of user interaction is sort of, um, wrong. So is giving a lot of guff to these entrants in an "interactivity" contest for not providing interactivity in the way that *you* wanted them to. If one of the criteria is that the back button works like you want it to in this contest, well, I'm 80% sure I could win. But hey, you're the judge and it's subjective after all.

Anyway. Yeah waiting sucks, and tacky things suck more.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled website, already in progress.

This discussion has been going on for a long time: form vs. substance. But it should be clear by now that the form of presentation is relatively unimportant--even usability is relatively unimportant--compared to rich, deep, flexible content. If you ask yourself "what are the five sites I cannot live without?" how many of your answers would value content over form? Here are mine (top of the head):

Google, IMDB, Slashdot, Amazon, eBay

Most of these don't even pass muster on usability measures, and I'll wager most people give similar answers. But marketing professionals drive the creation of most business sites, not designers or interaction specialists, and especially not content producers. And marketing professionals are interested in quarterly sales numbers, not substance, so it's hard to blame the designers--they go where the money is.

I'm speaking anecdotally--I know that there are important exceptions--but I'm pretty convinced that your average Dir. of Marketing with a $100k web budget has no conception of driving an effort to create content-driven anything. It's cheap and easy to bag on the marketing profession, so here's another point: marketing ALSO wins--it sells soap, beer, and cars by the boatload. It's a very interesting problem: the reasons we love certain sites/objects has nothing to do with marketing, yet marketing is a crucial and productive business function as evidenced by the sales numbers associated with so many products most would consider mediodre.

Jeff has made some good points without bashing into it. It doesn't sound like Jeff is Anti-flash, but anti-poor use of flash. There is a critical difference that i'm sure many here are not realizing. I got the sense that the "interactive bar" needs to be raised and because Flash is the main source for interactivity on the web, than it gets targeted. The real target is not Flash, but any user experience developer (web, CD, DVD, etc). This is everyone from the 15 year old kid with to Adaptive Path who builds for the web...raise the bar or don't use interactivity.

Not many have commented on the user experience or how to make it better, in order to raise the bar. Teach these designers how to design for a user, how to make interactivity achieve their goals in more meaningful ways, and give them the tools to do so, and you won't find posts like this or Keith* or even Merlin's. They are all throughtful looks at the product of flash but the real problem, if you could call it that, is the developer. Bash all you like, but make an effort to show how to do it better at the same time.

Flash has long had this burden on it because the market is flooded with examples of how it is poorly done. However, done right, "interactivity doesn't have to suck", as Josh Davis said years ago. It doesn't and when its done right its seemless and you, as the user, enjoy that experience and want to return to it. There is no point to a sound or to a motion unless it reinforces a goal. There is my tip for the day.

A good use of flash is the recent ford site by FI:
http://www.fordvehicles.com/

Two words: seemless flow.

Hmm. Maybe that's why it's so hard to find good webdesigners? I'm the Marketing Director who's frustrated with trying to find a good web designer who can facilitate the usability of a content-driven site.

After posting my sweepingly generalized comments yesterday, I had another thought about the general suckiness of web design. Once again, sweepingly generalized, but I think applicable nonetheless.... A lot of web designers aren't too good at analytical thinking. A lot of user interface design requires analytical thinking. The result? sucky user interface on websites.

"By the way, the job of marketing is to apply lots and lots of gloss."

I realize this comes from a rant, but it is as backwards a comment as I've seen in a while.

Good marketing connects the products or services of a business with the needs or desires of an audience.

Period.

How a marketing department chooses to accomplish that is a completely different discussion. But there is nothing inherently bad about marketing. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of bad marketing.

I am a marketing director (although w/o a $100,000 web budget). It has been my experience, that outside of blogs like this, not many executives have any idea about usability. They don't get the concept of attempting to guide users through the site in a logical manner that gives the prospect more and more information (in the order they need it) as they get deeper and deeper into the site. Instead the desire is to throw everything and the kitchen sink on each page and hope the user finds what they need.

But more then anything I think design and creative is subjective. I get clients telling me "hey, love your new site, it is so much better then your old site." While the next day a client says, "you know, to be honest, I can't stand your new site, I think the other version was better."

BTW: I would also have to agree w/ Tom. It is hard to find a good web designer/developer. And when you do, they are very busy!

..trying to figure out weather or not we should really care if big brother builds better web sites for soap. Its still just soap.

The people that build sites for things that actually matter, ..should just remember not to take their cues from Madison Avenue.

I guess I did go off a bit on marketing departments. Even good, informed marketing applies heavy gloss at times, though. That doesn't make marketers inherently shallow or dishonest. I hope it didn't seem as though I was suggesting that. Some of my best friends are marketers ;)

Great insight, Jeff. A couple years ago I read Zeldman making similar comments about entries into a prestigious design competition. His examination revealed that none even came close to validating as compliant HTML. Sure, many things can snag that perfect code and cause it not validate, but once I saw the code I couldn't believe that anyone could have such a poor understanding of HTML. In fact, one site was made totally of single large jpg images with image maps, nothing else! But yes, they did look nice.

It really makes me ashamed when I see how badly these "visual communicators" communicate.

I dunno, I was raised to have pride in my work and be a craftsman, not just to blow smoke up you know where.

Jeff, you just nailed the core of our frustration on this business right on the head. It's the neverending battle we must always face one day and another, as UX-focused web developers: For the average client, a web site is a web site is a web site... and if some clueless agency gets him sold in the idea that gratuitous Flash glitz and exploding "wow" factors is what he needs, then it's one lost customer to us (even if, over time, they come to us after realizing they were essentially fooled and robbed).

It probably wouldn't matter much if there weren't much effort involved on creating user-centered and standards-compliant design, but that's not the case - building and planning a site "the right way" takes A HECK OF a lot of effort, know-how, time and experience, which unfortunately are often undervalued in favor of vacous, short-minded, "wow"-inducing eye candy. Sometimes it is quite heartbreaking to go through all this effort only to have clients and media over there that cannot tell the whole, vast difference that lies between these types of work.

In response to nick- One thing so many designers keep forgetting, is that just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Gratuitous Flash is just onanistic, and tired as hell.

Funny I read this article tonight; I just got off a IM session with my client. The director told me. They don't really care about the visitors. (something to do with the print and more image etc etc) They just care about the presentation. Lucky, I won the argument in the end.

But this is the problem. The people who are in charge of commission things like this does not have a clue about what is it. They don't really know how annoying "their knowledge" annoy their customer big time ....

Same old same old story ....

One thing that hasn't come up is what it takes to enter such design competitions. My guess is that a lot of the designers who are doing the work you would reward simply self-select out of such competitions because they know they're probably not going to win, and the cost is too great to risk on something that is probably not going to pan out. Though I've won awards in the past, I'm sufficiently jaded about the process that I probably won't waste any more money on exorbitant entrance fees (talkin' about you, Webbys). And winning isn't all that, anyway -- unless you're consistently winning the big competitions like CA and HOW, the awards really don't mean that much.

Of course, reducing competition fees would probably increase the number of submissions by such a degree that it would overwhelm the judging process.

So where else do we turn for guides to well-designed, usable sites? The Web Standards Awards had some interesting picks, but it seems to have gone dormant. CSS Zen Garden shows some attractive designs and inspires me somewhat, but they're kind of like student work in that they don't really face real-world conditions. I'm still looking for a consistent source of inspiration.

DP Review helped me find my camera, though I must say that I didn't understand three-quarters of what it talks about until I'd been using my camera for several months. I would say the site has useful information, but I wouldn't call it particularly well-designed or even well-written. It's the kind of site I put up with because it has something I need, not because I enjoy the experience.

Flickr's an interesting case. Though it does great things with Flash, I was a little surprised to see that the page is built with tables. Given the web brainpower behind the site, I was sure it would have been standards-based. When I asked about it over there, the answer was that they're working very hard on trying to make the site as functional as possible, and the standards stuff would come later after they'd worked out various features, etc. Now that I've drunk the standards/usability Kool-Aid, I was kind of surprised to hear that, actually, but I was glad they were so forthcoming about their priorities and decision-making process.

Different ways of communication are appropriate at different times. The DPReview site you reference is a great site when you're on the cusp of a purchase and you want the nitty-gritty on a specific camera. You're not always in that use-case, however.

I see most of you folks talking about marketing. Now I'm not a designer, but this surprises me. I think you're putting the cart before the horse. I don't go to a web site looking for marketing, I go there looking for a service.

The sites mobil'homme and others have mentioned - Google, Amazon, eBay, Slashdot, Flickr - are all services. It seems to me that treating web site design as marketing is as crazy as treating supermarket design as marketing. Sure, there's marketing involved, but the real business of a store is to sell things. The business of a web site is to do something useful. If you can slip in some marketing on the side, good for you. But the audience isn't captive - if you don't serve them, they'll just leave.

Great article Jeff.

Holy jumping Jesus yes! I am just a rube of a web user and the things you mention in your Reducing Interactivity bullet are the very things that make me leave a site. DO NOT MESS WITH MY BROWSER WINDOW.

For interaction designers, a good little mental exercise to get your clients thinking about 'what is good web design' is to ask them what sites they use every day, not what they would like their sites to look like. The usual suspects they will name-- Google, Amazon, CNN, Yahoo!, and so on-- get it, presenting useful information without a ton of useless flying crap. Once you have a list of sites they use, start a discussion about why these sites work where others don't.

Asking your clients what sites they *like*, or what sites they want their site to *be like*, or what their *competitors' sites* look like are all potential dead ends, useful for perhaps determining style but not substance.

My studio recently launched our newest portfolio site. Go figure in the 3 months we worked on design directions, copywriting, etc we began to take Standards seriously (finally) and make Accessibility a key concern.

Once the new site was launched we began plans for version 4.0. A hybrid css/xhtml site with some flash componants.

I have to apologize for my studio's site falling into the category discussed above. We break all the rules and feel bad about it.

http://www.whencehthestudio.com

While I'm a huge proponent of web standards, and usable, content-rich designs, what some of the posts above seem to ignore is that different web sites serve different purposes.

Sure, if you're creating a blog-style site with feature articles, and the purpose of building a reader-base, most of the above is dead-on accurate.

However, not all web sites are like this. For example, the movie web sites mentioned in a previous post. Are these sites even trying to be usable like a Google or Amazon? The reality is that sites like this are primarily trying to excite visitors about the movie; not provide deep, rich content. Most likely, visitors to these sites would be dissappointed to find a blog-like, static, motionless design. They're actually looking for 'entertainment'.

While I'm not at all in disagreement with the majority of the comments above, I do think it's important to point out that different methods may indeed be appropriate for different types of sites, depending on the purpose of the site.

That being said, as a web developer at an ad agency, we don't do ANY sites that fall into the 'movie-like' category I've described. All our sites benefit from being content-oriented; perhaps not to the extent of a blog site, but to a lesser degree.

Nothing is more frustrating to have to constantly fight the Flash-y mentality of most agency web designs, knowing that our sites will consistently be beaten by these Flashy sites for all the web awards.

Bravo! I've worked with too many design agencies that are dismayed that they cannot design in flash for web content when I insist that the site be optimized for information retrieval, that form follow function, which means good html, css, and php coding.

Flash has its purpose, but it's mostly a bane to the purpose of the web.

gratuitous flash designer here.

all the sites you have listed as favorites have a 3 column layout and hypertext links.

Meaning: I groaned and closed them immediatly.

I like my content info sites as much as the next nerd.
But I LOVE my gloss. And I believe if you would open your eyes to an ACTUAL user base (joe channel flipping schmo) you'd find that this user IS often surfing for eye candy. This forum is imagining a world of savvy usabilty savants who will freak if they don't have full site content transparency. Actually, user joe wants just a laugh, a dirty joke, a sick animation, a transition that tickles.

This is interweb as entertainment portal. No longer info packet sharing-- this competes with the TV box. Do any of you watch the TV box?

This is internet for people who dont read. Who, wouldn't wade through the 30+ responses to this post. If you truly love the internet dont stop her at 3 column layout, left nav hypertextmarkupblah! She is morphing and expanding and mutating! Barely usable sites and frustrating interactions are merely roadkill on the path to something NEW. This is IMAGE v. WORD.

Don't be hating on PRETTY all the damn time. PRETTY is something NEW for this medium.

WTF!!?? I'm amazed to find this is still an issue! This is like five years ago. I really thought this was *over* by now.

But thinking about it, I just realize something. Truth is, this isn't the fault of the designers or the creative directors or the clients. For a moment, I thought it was the fault of the *users* for being too stupid to notice when they were getting a bad user experience and going somewhere else.

But really it's not even their fault. The real issue is that the web doesn't *matter* very much for the majority of companies.

Geoff's point about "services" is sort of right. But I'd suggest that what really defines someone with a good site is that they *need* a good site.

That's why blogs are fantastically well designed. (Or at least as well designed as anyone has figured out.) The site is all there is to them. (Blogger with bad usability = unread-blogger.) Ditto Google.

99% of commercial sites are just vanity projects. They're managed by the marketing people, and there's no metric to measure ROI. The creative director doesn't care about user experience because the user experience doesn't matter to the company.

Now, this is why Nielsen and co. bang on about ways of measuring ROI. That would force companies to take user experience seriously. But I'm not optimistic. Advertising has been running without good metrics or accountability for a century, and doesn't seem to have suffered as a result.

(Maybe the Taguchi Loss Function is your friend : http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030925.html )

I wonder if bornpretty can substantiate that claim?

Actually, how much fucking denial are you in? The *only* people who web-surf for pretty pictures are graphic designers looking for ideas to steal.

"user joe wants just a laugh, a dirty joke, a sick animation, a transition that tickles."

Have you stopped to think about this for one second? When Joe uses the web to get his dirty jokes or sick animation, he finds out about it through email, IM, in a chat-room or by reading a web-log. All of them, social, text-heavy applications where the interface doesn't get in the way of the use. How else *can* joe find out about them? Certainly not via some dud corporate brochureware with sound-effects. You need good "findability" to find even trash entertainment.

While I agree with most of what you say I wonder if the agencies have metrics that show that their approach works. It may be poor design but if the site increases sales isn't that all they are concerned about?

Jeffrey, I think there are two different issues here. Obviously people abuse flash, people abuse html too. But there are places for both big flashy sites and nice 3 columned info sites as well, I think you went overboard on your comments on the flashy sites, instead of getting to what the real point is, and that is that for these interaction awards, the sites with the 3 column grids never win or are most likely never entered, but more importantly, they aren't considered as sexy and "interactive" as the big flashy sites. which I find totally untrue. I'd rather make love to flickr all day then to have to click around in any website made for a car or a movie. but I can see why all these big brand companies want their websites to fall in line aesthetically with what their broadcast media looks and sounds like.

I wonder if "deland" from cn-webmarketing.com (comment spam post directly above as I type this) thinks that the job of marketing is to "connect the products or services of a business with the needs or desires of an audience". Heh.

Jeffrey writes: "These are the experiences most people have on the web, and use to form their opinions of what this new medium can be."

I think most people use Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon, at least if my non-techie friends, family, and acquaintances are any indication. They realize that all those marketese Flash sites suck too, and they largely ignore them, at least if they're trying to get anything done.

In other words, anyone who wants to find out anything about Coke doesn't go to Coke's website, because they know from lousy experience that a corporate site won't tell them what they need to know. Which is too bad, but it's good for Wikipedia.

I have to agree with some of what the comments made above by SoundBlstr. I think when you look at some of these sites throught the lens of "user-centric" design, you are missing the whole point.

Using this viewpoint, supermarkets are badly designed because they make shoppers walk all of the way through them to get essential items like milk. A "user-centric" design would insist on putting commonly purchased items at the front of the store where users can access them quickly.

The point is, supermarkets are not badly designed just because they aren't user-centric. They are well designed because in order to get important items like milk, users are exposed to many other products which they may purchase on a whim. Supermarkets are designed with the seller, not the shopper (user) in mind. Commerical art is not art. It's marketing.

As to your example, sites like dpreview.com are great if you are in the business of comparing different products. However, if you are a second-rate camera manufacturer trying to sell an inferior product, you don't really want the raw performance and such to be thrown up front and center. You would probably put that info in the back of the supermarket and fill the walk to it with marketing sludge.

Hey, if you're a designer who values interactivity and simplicity over superficial whiz-bang-distractedness, AND you're on the lookout for freelance work, AND you're in the NYC area, Rhizome.org would like to see your resume.

More here: http://rhizome.org/jobs/design_usability_consultant.php

Bornpretty: gloss is great, but you have to remember that designing for the web isn't about the designer - it's about the viewer. Sure, the user might respond to "gloss", but if they can't use the interface or web page because the designer has gotten carried away with some masturbatory, ultra-kewl design that they think is neat-o. Believe me, bornpretty, I used to be in your school of thought and blamed the user if they couldn't figure out my design... it took me a while to realize that my job was successful websites, not glossy design.

Yup. Things really haven't change all that much since the late 90's. At least not in the ad agency world where there is still this pervasive misunderstanding of the medium.

I've long given up on 'interactive competitions' as being anything truly worth participating in (whether that be entering a piece or just observing the results). In the end, 90% of them just end up being based on screen shots anyways, then reproduces as a thumbnail in some design annual. Our local AIGA chapter a last year ago tried to get the interactive thing going again but the results seemed the same:

http://www.peterme.com/archives/000329.html

You are my hero. These are simple things I have been complaining about for years. More people need to realize their website was meant for other people.

You can blame the designers if you like. I'm an interactive designer and I blame the clients. Every truly interactive idea I've ever thrown out is "too complicated". They really "just want something visually interesting". I do everything I can to convince them the web audience is intelligent and engaging but they don't listen. On top of which there's rarely a decent budget to do something useful with.

> Am I the only one who listens to music while using my computer?

No, you're not. You're one of the many people who hate techno beats competing with your latest playlist. If your site makes noise for No Good Reason(TM), I find that back button *pronto*.

In response to Noel B's supermarket analogy:

If you ONLY need milk, how often do you actually go into a large supermarket? My guess is - you don't. Because you value your time, you are willing to pay a little extra for a gallon of milk at the aptly-named "convenience" store

Suppose the shopper enters an unfamiliar supermarket and cannot immediately find the milk? Due to the time and energy already invested to get to the store, park, ect., the shopper will very likely ask for help.

Can't find what you are looking for on a website? A website visitor *may* check FAQ or the sitemap. Or they may not.

When faced with an annoying or unusable site, I often hit the back button and return to Google. Do you have a "Google Reflex"??

The web is a whole new ballgame, traditional marketing strategist need not apply.

Susan

Regarding sound: Certainly, most of us listen to music while using the computer. But we can also turn our music off, and should if we visit to a site where the designer has integrated sound as part of the experience. To deny such a powerful media type would be akin to limitting cinema to the days of the silent film. Sound can be a very crucial part of the experience, so let's give designers the freedom the deserve.

I suppose the objective of this article was to be critical of so many efforts, as is the author's perogative. However, designers: Every time you sit down to a clean slate to create a new experience, take everything you've read here and throw it out the window. Of course, don't repeat past mistakes, but also realize that every design element has an appropriate context.

-jjk