When bad UX is good
herebeseaswines.net
herebeseaswines.net
- Opaque, confusing, vague or misleading
- Garish, over the top or ugly
- Ironically reminiscent of older design trends that were embraced in earnest at the time
In video games, "retro"/pixel art styles are wildly popular, sometimes because story and gameplay are more important to the creators, sometimes because it was seen as a nearly lost art.
In web design, there have been several recent waves of "retro" trends embracing the styles once found on Geocities/Angelfire or even the original Myspace. There have also been several variants of "brutalist" design with oversized and unusually placed design elements, clashing or exceedingly drab colors. Such brutalist design has been embraced even by mainstream sites like Bloomberg, and in a lot of ways the novelty has worn off and it's just part of a resurgence of design diversity across the web after a long period of uniformity.
In other GUI software, intensely oversaturated colors (like those found in iOS since its "flat" redesign) were mocked mercilessly when introduced but seem to have almost become commonplace.
Like anti-humor, anti-aesthetic is sort of an oxymoron (as TFA points out). It turns out a lot of things that seem like they would be unappealing are actually quite appealing to at least a subset of the population. I am quite fond of a lot of "brutalist" design and find intensely oversaturated colors (in balance) pleasing to look at.
- it's toyish, games got an adult tag since ps2/ps3 but to me games are games.
- it's abstract, the run for photorealism can jump over the shark too. I like to play with representations and not absolute recreation of a thing. When playing honestly, I don't even have the time to enjoy the specular reflections or whatever BDR shader you cooked. It's mostly impressive on still images.
- it makes people seek other ways to surprise you instead of relying on the usual ultra capable 3d engines that often do the same thing but different skins.
- 3d art is technically harder (more layers to master to get to a result). Pixel art operations are indeed trivial and accessible without learning.
- good visual / animated / gaming art is hard no matter 1d, 2d or 3d. It's more an art than a technique.
Frankly, looking at the site that is being discussed I would call it "good UX" for being simple and "getting out of the way" of the original artist's work (which is the point of the site anyway). I do criticize making me download 2-3Mb pictures when they should be thumbnails though - but really outside of that gaff it's a fine site.
TLDR: Going on a "bad UX" rant feels disingenuous/silly when most designers would absolutely consider this good UX for getting out of the way of the original artist's work.
But I guess I tried to make a more general point. Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated. Both in terms of technology and interface. Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional. And professional often means the quite opposite of personal. Headache Comix just want to post stuff. Actually, one comment was that they don't care if things, in the end, would be hard to find given way more content. And that the people reading the magazine expects this. No, even wants it. Like walking in a museum as they should be (in my view), paintings all of the place - not perfectly aligned, not perfect degrees and lots of whitespaces and so on. :) I don't know if this explanation helped to clarify my take here, but... yeah.
I guess this is your point also, kind'a. And thank you btw! But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then? :) Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones. That's the beauty of the Web if you ask me.
> Sometimes my feeling is that blogs, small businesses such as this one, well... pages, in general, are overly complicated.
You're not alone in this, and good design is achieved when you can't take anything else away from something because the only components that are left are necessary to function.
> Overly complicated is unfortunately often spelled professional.
Ain't that the darn truth =|
> But I disagree with you about the 'silly' part. I actually think this is an important question. If it is true that some sites are overly complicated without good reasons, what then?
As a design-capable engineer I think you're painting with too wide of a brush in this blog post... and even against your own interests/ego. Sorry to get preachy but I love engaging people on these topics for learning.
You state: "and I am not even a designer" - but you clearly are capable of solving a visual problem in a functional way. At some level, you are now a designer. And, frankly, it feels like you're dealing with some impostor syndrome here.
Your post felt like it was weird with "bad UX is good" then positing a very good example of UX that problem solves in an appropriate way for both your client and your audience. You did an outstanding job of creating functional design, which is aesthetically pleasing, given the constraints of the web/the original art/etc. The simplicity of it all means that it is functional to both your client and your audience - I can't stress this enough.
If I were to write a post on your post it'd be entitled, "designer hits mark 100% for client/audience but isn't sure it's good design because we over-complicate UIX in 2020". Or, "Let's all stop being so pretentious because people are conflating simple functional design with bad design..." Sorry if I sound aggressive. It's just a damn good site and I refuse to even remotely label it as "bad" outside of your image optimization issue.
> Also, I make the case that the Web should house these sites as well as more 'professional' ones
You're talking to someone who browses neocities daily because it's interesting so 100% agree!
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All-in-all sorry if I was too harsh but I think you're being too harsh on yourself by writing this. As a 15 year design professional - You nailed it, and I'll be happy to crucify anyone who thinks otherwise. This is the definition of "good design". Period.
Just - whatever you do. Keep doing what you're doing - we need more people with your same design ethos out here building great tech experiences that are respectful and tasteful like your Headache Comix site. <3
PS: Fix those darn images. <3
Imposter syndrome. I feel it all the time as a programmer. But I don't if it's a necessarily bad state. Doesn't it matter how we relate to it? This is my view. Only if we give in, and don't try because we feel imposters it's a bad state. I am not saying it's a good state, but still - it's a state that can very productive! Well, another discussion... but it's a very interesting one.
I struggle with the same thing myself... SOME impostor syndrome is healthy and it sounds like you are handling it in good way =)
The design credit tucked in the bottom links to a nice writeup on making this site, but currently has an cert error - https://www.madebyneversink.com/
Sold! I've found going for second best almost always has a superior cost-value ratio! You can eat sushi in Tokyo at Jiro's... or go to the second best place at a fraction of the cost.
https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/283188235055_/16oz-A...
There is no certificate for "www" for whatever reason.
You wouldn’t buy a vehicle made yesterday that had all the worst features of the original Ford Model T, would you?
I checked out your website in the hopes of discovering this was intended as some kind of really hard to detect ironic antihumor, but it seems sincere. Buddy, you listen to Lords of Acid, the Geocities of music. Lighten up :)
It's fast, functional, fun, obviously retro on purpose.
It's quite good actually.
I think they went a little overboard. If they dialed it back it would be a nice homage, right now it’s a callback to the worst of the worst, which is also fine because clearly that’s what they were going for. I just enjoy subtlety.
I’d argue a design that is more prone to failure is bad design. The rest is all subjective, more power to them.
I guess that shows why websites shouldn't mess with standard UX things, such as having unvisited links blue (or at least something other than the 'visited link purple' colour).
I will take this moment to repeat that it would take less than a second to make those links blue instead of purple and the design would already be infinitely more usable.
Sometimes bad ux is bad.
It seems they intentionally took a second to change the default behavior and make links purple. facepalm
Using this weird syntax I didn't know was legal: <body vlink="#ff0000" text="#000080" link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff">
They're deprecated attributes[1], but back in the 90s before CSS became meta, it was the norm.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.1
A huge problem? Maybe not, but not a sign of 'good UX'
“Bad visual design” or “ugly”, perhaps (though I don’t think so), but User Experience is only very loosely correlated with “looking good”.
If the end result is good for the user, it’s not bad UX.
(Similarly, you can be a great graphics/web/UI designer but horrible at UX)
Indeed. A browser's reader-mode is a testament to the fact.
The menu is head and shoulders above many hamburger or drop downs on “real” sites.
For a brief period of time, every human with an internet connection had access to a significant portion of the sum total of previously-preserved human knowledge. Web 2.5 has pushed us backwards. After several years now of being unable to easily find relevant results using Google, DDG, etc., I had the crushing realization that, near 30 and for the first time in my life, less truly useful information was available to me, to the average person, than had been before.
This should scare people. Powers that are obfuscating both their rationale and the mechanics of their means are making a play for our collective knowledge base.
Are you saying that informational resources are being forcefully taken down? Or that their rankings are artificially lowered in search engines?
Duckduckgo is worse, it only has wikipedia-fakes...
And after this small experiment I'm reall frightened and staring at my bookshelf for resolve, in parallel searching for the HN article where people recommend "civilization rebuilding" material...
I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!
People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.
To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation: - Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility. - Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.
Also there is nothing wrong with just editing html directly. It is a very good starting point for many projects like personal sites and other small projects.
Personally I didn't really enjoy setting up Jekyll since I'm not all that at home with Ruby so I would recommend looking at alternatives. Once it's set up though, it's very convenient to work with.
The Github repo is cloned locally, I write posts in markdown and then simply push to the repository. Netlify watches the repository for changes and automatically deploys whenever there's changes. It's very convenient. The compilation cost is paid upfront so the page is very fast as well. Last I checked, it scored 98-100 on all metrics in Lighthouse.
!doctype html
<meta charset='utf-8'/>
<title> the page </title>
<style> h1 { font-weight: bold } </style>
<h1> Hello, world </h1>
<p> here's some body text </p>
I should say, you probably have different goals than me, but as a full time engineer I wanted to make this site as easy as possible to work on and not get stuck fiddling around with configuration or other bullshit timewasting stuff that doesn't actually help me get my ideas out. It's extremely refreshing to work this way :)
There’s deliberately bad aesthetic, which I don’t mind, but this is bad design because it wastes bandwidth. The image could be resized to the display size without losing its visual impact, and it would save users a lot of time.
The archive is intended to be like so by request. The idea would be caching. They count on people to clicking on all the covers. If it's this is the case or not, I don't know. But their target groups is very narrow on the other hand.
This 'argumentation' is not valid though in the case with the picture at 'about'. And that's my fault. I will fix this.
So yes, you're right. One could argue the same is true for the images at the 'about' page. But yeah...
The right word for it is appropriateness I think. Texture created by randomness is appropriate in this case, of the kind you find in actual comic stores that get packed with stuff organically over time. Or think of your room when you were young, it's an anti systemic human touch.
I think sometimes people can be less trusting of the "professionals", and instead prefer something a bit more independent.
In a previous role we'd built some flashy new landing page + initial flow designs, highly polished, to replace some pretty ugly ones. Our customers were perhaps people who'd had bad experiences with some of the big brands.
As everything at the company was very data-driven, we put the new designs live in an A/B test with the existing ones. It didn't take long to get the statistical significance to prove that the old scrappy designs converted way better.
That was an eye-opening for me; Always done A/B testing where I can since then.
Customizing your MySpace profile was done by pasting chunks of CSS into one of the fields on the "edit profile" page. It was an accidental "feature" because they didn't understand XSS - but they added filtering and kept it.
This is a TERRIBLE way of offering customization. But it worked, because it encouraged people to share tips. Having a custom profile became a status symbol, and friends would help each other figure out how to do it.
It occupied this weird space where a difficult flow with a desirable reslt encouraged social participation and gave people a huge sense of achievement if they could figure it out.
When I read an article, I want to get the content immediately, in a dark theme, with a readable font and size/spacing. Instead, i get 3 popups, 2 banners i can't close, a bright white background, some crap webfont, several MB of ads and social media garbage, etc.
The web has devolved from what it was without the 'flash'.
The reader mode note was simply to say I prefer the text only style.
The second paragraph is there because this article is talking about a simple web page, and I'm complaining that more sites don't do simple styles.
I'm not sure why you had to be so condescending about my comment, maybe you're a designer?
Nothing was shared between sites, lots of cutting up pngs for link headers, cryptic navigation, all that stuff I have to avoid doing now.
It was probably the most fun I had working with a designer.
This is a great analogy for the web, hopefully it will remain true without succumbing to authoritarian control.
This makes me worried as well. Even though I know this, I always tend to, at the moment, forget the limitations some countries have. China, Russia, Iran, and others.
There such tendencies, or views only (so far), in Europe where I live, that seems to think this is a good thing. Not as extreme perhaps. But like: in relation to values x, y, z the content and values a, b, c are bad and because they are bad they should be removed. And no, not speaking about things like child pornography.
The difference between liberal values in general and others is that liberal stance (interpreted very broadly) allows criticism of the liberal stance, while we know from history that totalitarian states and ideologies such as communism, fascism, and so on solve things with bans and by burning books.
I know what kind of world I want my children to get older in...
I'd rather have them interested in communism at 15 and radical. That they have the possibility to browse the Web for texts on communism than an authoritarian control saying communism (or some other ideology) is wrong and removing such sites. And the Web is best aligned with a liberal stance. I write more about my view here: https://herebeseaswines.net/essays/2020-04-28-the-web-is-ama.... But I want to add - even though I've been active in the Swedish liberal movement for a while - that market economy when too far also threatens the Web.
Kudos to them for not falling into the productivity trap of constantly changing UIs.