The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It
uxmovement.com
uxmovement.com
These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation.
I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin text-only "buttons" on a background image. It's a bad idea when Apple does it, too, but if you don't follow Apple's aesthetic your stuff looks "dated". A lot of perfectly fine 2007-2010 vintage sites have been mangled by redesigns following this trend, just so they don't "look old".
If someone develops a browser extension to somehow recognize and remove these things without damaging page flow and functionality, I'll install it. Bonus for forcing those floating site menus that disappear on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up (blocking the thing you were scrolling up to see!) to stay at the top of the page where they belong. I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away rather than being in the header and footer.
I blame Google/Android for all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality.
No joke, my favorite part of the general disdain for hamburger menus is all the ways people describe them.
The thing is that the user being grateful or not isn't what matters, what matters is that they click on those links and thus increase pageviews (doesn't matter if it was intentional or not).
As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.
I installed the new iTunes for my friends dad this weekend when I was helping him with his computer troubles. It took me way too long to find the file menu and it occurred to me in that moment that UI/UX designers have gone too far. In the pursuit of simplicity the marble nose has been chipped off the sculpture.
And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse.
What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog bugs) designers/developers are doing it on purpose. Please stop! Other people have to use your software!
I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match:
+----------------+
| |
| |
| External |
| | +--------------+
| | | |
+----------------+ | ThinkPad |
| |
+--------------+
+----------------+
| |
| | [Dialog]
| External |
| | +--------------+
| | | |
+----------------+ | ThinkPad |
| |
+--------------+
Just like in the XKCD, the modal dialog locked up the File Explorer window that had opened the dialog. After running into this many times I figured out a workaround using keyboard shortcuts to move the dialog back onscreen.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-f...
Also accessible by right clicking a titlebar, for anybody who's familiar with that one.
Another annoyance with iTunes is that they removed the border. If it's placed over a white background, you can't tell where the iTunes window ends. Minimalism done right can be a beautiful thing. When it's done wrong (it's very difficult to get right), it's a disaster.
Or put longer: hiding functionality with out actually taking away the need to manually interact with the function is a superficial design utility improvement.
All this is terrible because the product looks so interesting.
Contrast the Campaign Living site with another startup's site: https://vanhawks.com/. This one has a similar big picture on the front page. But there's also a functional nav bar at the top. Product details don't get lost in the big pretty pictures. It's easy to figure out what Vanhawks is selling and what differentiates their product.
While your description of the product sounds like something I'd want, I'll sadly never be able to investigate it.
Having a plaintext fallback isn't that hard people!
Scrolling made the animations run. I didn't see a skip button so I probably get to enjoy those no matter what every time I visit.
Actually it's worse than nothing because it seems to promise something with the teaser arrow, but that goes nowhere. Going for the "Reserve Now" button is unlikely, after all, what am I reserving? Leaves the impression they have nothing to offer.
I really dislike nav bars that take up space on the screen, making it more annoying to read the article or get the info I'm seeking. (Though Firefox "reader" mode can help.) The opposite, no links at all, is certainly worse.
a) don't have perfect eyesight
b) work in rooms with inadequate lighthing (e.g. sunlight from behind, making subtle contrasts basically vanish)
c) surf on mobile which most often is equivalent to b), with the addition that the device is shaking relative to the eyes, making the text even harder to read.
I get that it's their brand colours, but really? Look how much more readable the older docs are: https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.1.0/
No docs? => get off.
Docs unreadable => get off.
Docs outdated/StackOverflow filled with crap that is obsolete since 2 months and the question was asked 1 month ago => get off, work on your backwards compatibility, come back maybe.
Docs readable and reasonably current and the first 10 google hits for a common question don't offer 10 contradicting versions? => <3
I know that friction is bad, however, I refuse to assume that my users have an IQ of less than a carrot. I am not exactly asking them to sprint laps by either clicking an icon, or looking in the place they expect a navbar and figure out they can still use the links if I didnt make the rectangle box they sit in white
Think of it less as an IQ issue and more of a "cognitive energy" issue. Even a smart person would prefer something easier rather than harder because they've got things to do with their limited cognitive energy budget other than merely navigate your website. Plus energy burned that way is energy they're not burning on your actual content, whatever it may be.
It's like accessibility in general; you make your site work well for impaired vision, you've almost certainly improved it for everybody.
The author is making a very broad statement, without supporting data it's nothing more than opinion.
Which it is.
Because there is no data to support the claim.
It's what science is for, in a nutshell. Not trusting ourselves to not make incorrect assumptions without evidence.
This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The focus shifts from full navigability (logging in, become a host, etc) to searching for a listing.
The above statement is everything that is wrong with modern visual styling of software. After everything is said and done, software is a tool which people use to accomplish a goal. I would argue that anything that causes friction with that is Bad Design.
As much as some visual/interaction designers may think that "experience is everything", they ignore that they are insisting on manufacturing and enforcing their opinion of what the users experience should be and forget that the user accomplishing their goal is the only experience that matters.
As an industry we're hurting ourselves by being in this state of cognitive dissonance. The result is that designers try to apply patterns for selling people shit when they're working on tools, even if given tool is the "real deal" and not meant to drive sales by appearance.
Basically, within a given flow (say onboarding or signup), you want to consider having some points of friction interspersed with low friction points. Adding friction in the right places helps to create users who will a)come back and b)will be more active users. The speaker presented some data to back up her assertions.
Getting back to OP's point, the emotional experience is a point of friction that may be worthwhile. Though it may slow down the conversion process or whatever flow the user is supposed to go through, it may result in users who become more attached to the product and ultimately spend more.
I think trying to evoke a certain emotional response can really only be effective if it's not getting in the way.
I's not absurd at all - it's only absurd if you're in the demo that finds it absurd. And that's quite a small demo compared to most of the population.
You can't sell most people shit unless you create an emotional response.
Hacking psychology - for good or ill - is the basis of all UI and UX. It's a completely different problem to hacking code.
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.
For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases completion rates -- if you look at your homepage as another page that needs completions then this makes perfect sense.
Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.
But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".
And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.
that's why I love "Reader View"
I personally don't like the ugly monochrome bar across the top. (Although I do like it when one appears as I scroll down the page, fading in)
My prediction is that Affordance will come back in a big way pretty soon.