Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites?
What are some well-designed websites in term of design, look & feel, and usability? The Apple website might be an example.
However, I don't envy the developers that need to keep this ASP.NET web parts site up to date.
Ironically, legacy .NET toolchains like Web Forms and Web Parts can be very productive and very easy to maintain, if designed well. Most of the pain comes from the MS vendor lock-in and lack of continuing support. Microsoft has moved on from these technologies so they are no longer well supported and don't have a very defined upgrade path to more "modern" approaches.
Nah.
But people here, and myself, are going to tell you that those are not well designed sites. Well designed sites are mostly text, good typography, follow all accessibility guidelines, etc.
The main concepts that I look for are:
- Speed / performance - does the website load and finish rendering quickly?
- Focus - does the website guide my eye & attention to the most important/relevant information first? Or does it instead distract me with superfluous information.
- Accessibility - This is a broad topic that doesn't just only mean "friendly for screen-readers." It includes things like: is the website easy to read and navigate? Does it not interfere with native browser functionality (websites that prevent the right-click context menu or do not play nicely with the back button are not accessible IMO). This is all in addition to being accessible for special needs users.
- Intent - similar to focus but more specific to message and communication: do I immediately understand the purpose of this website and what value it offers me? A lot of marketing websites, IMO, completely fail on this point for me.
There's probably more, but I think the above describes the general categories. As I try to think through other examples they tend to fit nicely as a sub-point/example of one of the above.
"well-designed" is a very subjective term.
Craigslist is a website so elegantly designed that I know 80 year olds that can use it just fine.
Yeah I'd argue Netflix absolutely aren't designing for usability. The most usable UI they could offer starts with a big button saying "continue watching the last show you were watching" but that runs the risk of you stopping watching once you're done with that show. They want to push new stuff at you constantly.
> Nothing Microsoft has ever made has been usable
I'd argue Windows Phone 7 was one of the purest examples of usable UI I've ever interacted with. Then it all got destroyed. The sad reality is that good, usable design is never the top priority.
Very much agreed. WP7 was a nearly perfect platform for communication.
What's worse is the vast majority of engineers somehow think they understand UX and design by mistakenly extrapolating their engineering expertise into domains which their engineering expertise does not apply. They end up in this hubris-fueled Dunning-Kruger feedback loop of creating software with a bad user experience.
If you're an engineer who does understand the user and what makes a good experience for them, you have a power few possess and you can make some seriously profitable and useful things.
No.
I suspect most of the websites suggested here will lie in the top left corner. This is exemplified by websites of tech / SaaS companies, with the universal header, a centered display-sized black-weighted heading in Inter, the various screenshots, testimonials, all responsively arranged and come with dark mode, and (possibly falling out of vogue) squishy-squashy Memphis corporates. These are the playgrounds of Tailwind, Vercel, Linear.app, Shopify, PlanetScale, Supabase, etc. Modern at first sight, but quickly dull the senses. Passable for their supreme usability (the Vercel dashboard works better on mobile than many websites on desktop).
On the bottom right corners are the grandiloquent, the pompous, the extravagant. See them on Awwwards. Somehow, I feel a sizeable of Web3 websites fall into this, though I have only superficial exposure to them, with their overuse of transitions and animations.
It's hard to find the exemplary websites, the residents of the top right corner. Some suggest the apple.com website, which I feel is certainly worthy of consideration but whose style I don't really grok. I shall leave here some suggestions, whose merits I hope is clear upon the first visit:
The most neutral definition of a "well designed" website, without any further context, could be "created in a way that helps users achieve intended goals efficiently, while keeping max number of users happy about its look".
Again, different audiences will have very different answers. Here at HN, sites like https://www.mcmaster.com/ and https://www.craigslist.org win – because HN users appreciate old look and how efficient these sites are.
https://www.apple.com/ is an industry standard of a marketing site for consumer tech. It's not universally "well designed".
Other examples of well done marketing pages: https://www.sketch.com/ ; https://statamic.com/ ; https://linear.app/ got its share of hype recently.
Other times, a website is well designed because its content is awesome and is easy to consume. See https://ciechanow.ski/ and https://www.joshwcomeau.com/
Is https://github.com/ well designed? As an amateur developers, I'd say yes.
Is https://htmx.org/ well designed? Hmm, at a glance, there's no design at all. Is no design also design? That's a rabbit hole.
P.S. I often hear my website is well-designed :-)
That's right! To me, personally, a well-designed website is: - Quick and responsive - Easy on the eyes - Easy on the mind - Doesn't yell at me with unpleasant effects, oversized videos, or nervous ads - Doesn't surprise me
That is universal for any kind of website.
* either build them in-house if there are skills;
* or buy a template and customise it;
* or hire a designer/developer/team to do it. The awesomeness of the result directly depends on clarity of requirements, I think.
As an example, I recently designed a website for BinaryNights [0], and we did use Linear.app as a starting reference, but during the discussions quickly shifted towards more minimalistic approach.
I heard some people admire https://linear.app/ but I don't see the appeal myself
Majority of websites often fall into one of two categories:
1. Traditional off the shelf template
2. Look cool but fail when it comes to usability and robustness (those featured on awwwards)
I would recommend browsing through some of the critques on the DesignCourse channel. On some videos people submit their site for critique, and he often live edits them to make them better. https://m.youtube.com/@DesignCourse
Honorable mentions go to:
I love this website so so much.
Ironically, apple.com doesn't even support dark mode!
Also, the hover menus are a usability nightmare: https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-2-9.html
Not to mention that apple.com has a long history of terrible scrolljacking.
The wording if this makes it sound like supporting dark mode is table stakes. I don't think this is really the case. Personally, I don't expect a site to support dark mode by default.
I was ready to say that I guess that most users don't really know dark mode exists, but apparently over 80% of users prefer dark mode according to "studies" described at the links below. However, the methodology of any of these studies isn't really described, so I'm not at all sure of these results.
https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/dark-mode-users/ https://marketsplash.com/dark-mode-usage-statistics/
> The wording if this makes it sound like supporting dark mode is table stakes. I don't think this is really the case. Personally, I don't expect a site to support dark mode by default.
The irony is that Apple invented dark mode, so I do expect that site to support dark mode by default.
Do you have a source for that? Windows had dark mode in 2016, macOS in 2018 and iOS/Android in 2019.
Apple proposed the standard: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3299
Safari 12.1 was the first browser to ship with color-scheme and prefers-color-scheme support: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
- There's no "user" persona - Craigslist doesn't develop their site to be addicting.
- There are no ads
- The buttons for doing basic actions have not moved
- You don't need to reveal any personal information to use the service
- It does two things, and only two things well - helps buyer buy shit and helps sellers sell shit
It also takes a lot longer to load now, try using it on a slow link. Despite being all text on the main page, it's not instantaneous.
Seems a bit disingenuous when the content purely is advertisements.
I agree that Craigslist is a unique asset and a worthwhile service and ultimately a well designed website.
I think we both know what "there are no ads" means...so why be so pedantic about it?
I'm just stating I don't see it as an "ad free" site which I understand to be like most of the other websites mentioned. I don't see me as being pedantic but OP playing fast and loose with definitions.
What are the problems with sites with lots of ads? Does Craiglist have any of those problems?
The only "ads" on CL are for things on CL.
I really do think lesswrong is a beautifully done site. Minimal, light design without gimmicks and a very functional comment threading system.
I don’t read much content there but it’s always a pleasure when I do.