Exclusive Design
exclusive-design.vasilis.nl
exclusive-design.vasilis.nl
Reading mode had to be invented, so that many websites could actually be read.
I don't disagree with you, I was running an ancient laptop as my main box until a few months ago, so I know first-hand how frustrating it is. It's hard to play games or watch videos with only 128mb VRAM and almost no shader/codec acceleration support!.
But at the same time, it greatly increases the variety of devices and standards you need to support (there's a pretty huge gap between a 10 year old machine and a modern one, but 3 or 5 years are reasonably similar), and thus blows out the scope and difficulty of creating and maintaining a system. As a programmer, it's quite frustrating when removing support for outdated hardware / operating systems could make a system so much cleaner.
Then there's security considerations, e.g. if you have to leave deprecated versions of SSL enabled to support outdated clients, that weakens the entire system.
They don't have to. I know how to fix the font width via developer tools. But many people don't and devs can then hardly go and complain that their websites are losing audience or have high bounce rates.
Also this is mostly about respect for displays people may be using to view the website. There's nothing that much outdated about an old display. It just has lessened brightness/contrast. You don't have to support it in any way and there are no security implications.
This. They're not only missing accessibility, they're missing general usability. We're drowning in a mess of shiny, over engineered but annoying pop-ups, carousels, hamburgers, infinite scrolls, etc...
Design has barely been born on computing devices frankly. Apple was the first, and remains, the only computing company with any taste at all. So really, the entire industry has some designers working for one company, that the rest shamelessly copy.
That said I'm not the target market and I accept that.
Which was brilliantly satirised by Pratchett's in discworld by the cities ruler (same except with rats) who had a simple solution "tax the rat farms".
Unfortunately, no style sheet will help people write clear and concise text. I continue to have to skim through lots of large text .
I don’t. Because typically these redesigns do away with visually distinct borders on tables/elements/zones and make everything flat and indistinct. Because that’s cool right now.
The new Kinguin frontpage is a very good example. I hate it.
The flaw of course is that more ink does not necessarily mean more visual noise. With the axes example, disconnecting them means that you now have two high-level visual objects rather than one, and the whole chart starts to looks like a mess of individual objects on the page. If you have several graphs next to each other then it's much easier to focus one and exclude the others if they're in boxes rather than having component objects floating indistinctly near each other. But Tufte only sees a count of black blobs of ink or black pixels, as if each one has its own mental cost.
As an aside, the book is still fantastic because it has loads of examples of unconventional charts and figures, and you can just ignore the text (or, better, read it skeptically). I found out about it from xkcd originally [2] and I suspect that many others did too.
I suppose as with most things your mileage may vary.
"As you may see, when they reach the bottom of the screen the text of the link disappears behind the so called status bar. This is just one example of the broken state of default focus behaviour. There are many more. It shows that keyboard navigation is neglected by the people who build browsers as well."
This originated as part of a wider initiative to give us a "cleaner" browsing experience (part of the whole make-everything-flat-and-hide-it-behind-a-hamburger-menu) with less wasted space, by hiding the once always-present status bar (see http://toastytech.com/guis/ff15t.html ) and showing it only when needed. Kind of like GTK scroll bars today.
Like many other similar attempts, this fell flat on its face in the real world (for this and many other reasons), but the field of UI/UX design is still in a state where if you point out things like these, you're contemptuously told that this is how progress looks like and that consumers today want a functional look without extraneous widgets, and that it's a fringe case anyway. Punched cards are usually brought into discussion if you so much as utter the name "Netscape".
Edit: Reading this series makes me feel vindicated, I think?:-). See this: https://exclusive-design.vasilis.nl/design-like-its-1999/ .
<<This enables Simon to browse the archive and use it for his pleasure and his research. Simon was amazed. While he had tried many times before, he had never found these three thematic entrances to the 2Doc archive.
When I showed this design to Yuri Westplat, a colleague of mine and very experienced UX designer, he exclaimed: "this is what websites looked like in the nineties! Where did we go wrong?!">>
Also from the same page a very interesting point that I have not given much thought:
> Screen readers
> I’ve always assumed that adding detailed structural semantics to an HTML document is a good idea. I started to doubt if this is such a good idea when I observed casual computer users who depend on a screen reader. All elements that have some relevant semantic value, like heading levels, navigation items, links and forms get this meaning attached to it, which is spoken out loud. So this page would’t simply start with the title spoken out, but it would sound like heading level one, The defaults suck. When a page consist of many elements, things can become very annoying.
> My impulsive reaction was to create websites without any structural semantics in them. Bram Duvigneau pointed out that, while this might indeed help some casual screen reader users, it would very much cripple the experience for experienced users.
I've thought about stripping away some HTML semantics to make screen reader navigation less "wordy." Navigation menus are often coded as unordered lists. I've considered not making them lists because I'll keep menu length manageable (no more than 7) and I know the screen reader will announce "link" plus the link text for every item; the separation between items should still be clear. But it might not be clear when they reached the end and it would be contrary to the norms users are familiar with; I wouldn't make this change without testing it with multiple real screen reader users.
Soon you'll just be asking Siri things without knowing where information comes from, and the information will likely be derived from many sources, so crediting any single author becomes irrelevant in a world where many authors contribute to any result or answer.
While we are different human beings, we don't even have the same computer lenses. I believe the digital assistant will be the one homogeneous interface to rule them all. Everything should become an API, whether you're offering content or services.
In a dystopia version megacorporations own and control the digital assistant and can decide what information it feeds to you. It will become the marketer you trust, which has a significant influence on the decisions you do.
But, man, the design this page is using is anything but pleasant on the eye...
That being said, making the browser window less wide changes the design to a more readable variant.
I think most people are not even aware of neither the need, nor the features available to them, but let's be honest: it is more work to make a website accessible, and so it will rarely be put in a budget. We need laws, just like we have a11y laws for buildings, etc.
That being said, there is a need for more detailed guidance on what it means to make something accessible. For instance with video captions for the hearing impaired, is it ever okay to post a video then add the captions when they're done? Is it ever okay to post videos then add captions to each upon request; what if all the videos had automated captions, generally considered not sufficient, but could be fixed by humans upon request? If a video is of a single person speaking continuously, would a transcript be an adequate text alternative?
The Web platform, on the other hand, has no standard widgets; everybody invents their own, and because making those widgets accessible requires more work, nobody does that. Things like Bootstrap are a step in the right direction in this regard, but are still a long way behind the things that GUI app developers were taking for granted 20 years ago.
If we want accessible Web apps, we need to make developing accessible Web apps easier than developing inaccessible ones.
User interface design and implementation has to be automated. The current paradigm doesn't scale, neither for providers nor users. It's perhaps software's main bottleneck.
This is not a new idea. I'm sure many people are working on this, but I still think this is something we don't talk about enough.
What seems to be happening is that the page waits for the woff2 fonts to be downloaded before allowing the text to render. I recall also reading on HN that Google AMP has an 8 second timeout before it allows the page to be rendered, unless the AMP js scripts are all loaded first (so people who use content blockers effectively have an enforced 8s delay). Both are stupid techniques - sure, a user with good internet (and the web designers) will no longer see a split-second flash of text (on this website) or unstyled HTML (on AMP) before it switches to the new font - but it's effectively a mandatory delay for those who don't have this privilege. An improvement of 1% for the [rich and included] and a significant decrease in functionality for the [poor or excluded].