Why Web Pages Suck
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
You click a link to go to an interesting-sounding page. Your mouse is still wherever that link was on the previous page, but now, blammo!, it randomly lands on some menu, which won't wait to find out whether you wanted to see it or not. It just throws up all over the page and leaves you looking for a way to get rid of it.
You scroll the new page a bit, click another link, and blammo, another menu jumps up and covers the new page. You see a link near the top of the page you want to click and as your mouse heads up to it, blammo, you pass over another menu that jumps out and covers what you were trying to click.
Usually, a popup signup ad will stay closed after you close it the first time, but these menus won't EVER stop jumping up in your face. Tooltips or items that highlight themselves in place on hover are no problem, because they don't get in the way, but menus are meant to cover other things. That's why all native OSes have menus wait until users explicitly ask for them.
And touchscreen devices essentially have no hover, so if your menus had to have these obnoxious dynamics for users to discover that they were menus, it would mean that your design was nearly unusable on devices with no mouse. Make your menus obvious to users without a mouse and you no longer have to make them obnoxious to users with a mouse.
Tell your designer friends: when you have caught someone's attention and made them want to see something on your site, don't then suddenly block their view with something they DIDN'T want to see, something they then have to escape from, whether "Sign up now!" or "Click here to tell your friends about us!" or "What do you think of us now?" or "Here's a cascading menu of things you weren't asking for instead of what you wanted!"
Sadly, they work! One claimed a 78% larger sign-up rate and the other was something like a 65% larger sign-up rate.
I did not discuss churn rates with them - but overall traffic to the sites weren't largely impacted I was told.
Note that the popups on each of these sites was a one-time deal on a user's first visit. After closing it you never saw it again (unless you clear your cookies or browse incognito, etc.)
I have noticed that some sites make the popover happen when you mouse off of the window to the back button, which kind of makes sense because you're leaving anyway.
Unfortunately you're in the minority. Every A/B test I've seen shows popovers performing much better than end-of-article placements on all dimensions.
Important, but unanswered questions (because they are hard, so let's ignore them!):
(1) How many of these users just mark all of the newsletters as spam?
(2) How many users don't realize that they can dismiss the dialog, and enter their email because they think that they are forced to? How many of these are really "engaged" users vs. just users that are willing to jump through a couple of hoops before they disappear in the ether?
(3) If those extra sign-ups are due to people thinking that they have to enter their email, how is this any different (ethically or practically) than actually forcing them to enter their email? Are you only making this distinction in the smallest way possible so that you don't run afowl of anti-spam laws?
(4) Did the A/B test include a "No thanks, I want to read the article instead" instead of just a "No thanks" button? How much does that affect the number of sign-ups?
(5) How many of those users will actually open their newsletters vs. getting lost in the clutter of other newsletters that they automatically sign-up for?
My newsletter open rates are around ~45% and click rates are ~15% which both seem to be pretty good and I attribute this to the fact that you have to really want to subscribe in order to do so. Given that I pay based on the number of subscribers I have, and that the purpose of my emails is to point people to the website, I actually periodically unsubscribe people that never click/open them.
To answer your questions from my experience (dealing with a non-tech audience):
> (1) How many of these users just mark all of the newsletters as spam?
The deliverability and negative feedback for users who come in through the popover is not statistically different from users who sign up in other positions (bottom of the page, for example).
> (2) How many users don't realize that they can dismiss the dialog, and enter their email because they think that they are forced to?
We did some basic user testing and the vast majority of people had no difficulty with finding the close dialog. If this were the reason, I think it would be born out in (5).
> (3) Are you only making this distinction in the smallest way possible so that you don't run afowl of anti-spam laws?
IANAL, but I don't think there's actually any law preventing an email wall. We even tested one at some point but it did have a meaningful effect on bounce rate, and it did tend to get more undeliverable emails than the dismissable version.
> (4) Did the A/B test include a "No thanks, I want to read the article instead" instead of just a "No thanks" button? How much does that affect the number of sign-ups?
Why would a business do this? What business goal would including the additional copy fulfill?
> (5) How many of those users will actually open their newsletters vs. getting lost in the clutter of other newsletters that they automatically sign-up for?
In my experience, ~20% open the emails and then 40-50% click a link within the email. These rates were not statistically different for people who subscribed through popovers vs. less intrusive forms.
That being said, I still personally dislike popovers and never subscribe through them.
That is, by far, the most ridiculous click through rate I have ever seen for a newsletter.
We have a pretty great fanbase. :)
The (usually) unasked questions are whether those people represent actual customers (or just the terminally clueless) and whether getting a few more email addresses for your newsletter is worth irritating the crap out of the other 90% of site visitors.
Click away from modal content; Try ESC button; Close browser tab
"Hey, you were probably about to give us some actual money, but would you mind stopping that and doing something else instead?"
Yes. This is a very successful way to increase those numbers
> Does this actually work?
A more important question! The issue is that the numbers that the website owner is trying to get up are really low to begin with - usually <1% or so.
So you have to think like a Bayesian here. What are the chances of someone who isn't computer literate enough to know there's a way to dismiss the dialog and believes that giving their email address is the only way to continue?
Even if 99.8% of users are smart enough to x out of that dialog, then bam, you've increased your newsletter membership by 20%!!! (simply by confusing 0.2% of your visitors) Congratulations! Look at how effective you are! You're now giving a bunch of novice computer users email they don't want and shit they won't read!
Either these things aren't looked at holistically or they are and people don't care about user experience.
Think about it, you have to do this using CSS because all the browsers block doing the same functionality with another window.
Once you start asking questions like "how many exits happened at dialog versus how much convergence?" you will, as I have, see ~60x more exits from service then engagement with dialog. You lose 6,000% more than you gain.
And yes, the engagement is so low on most analysis that you can't dismiss marginal user error in many of the cases as constituting a large percentage of engagement.
We can do better
A pop-up or -under window and a modal dialog are also different in that the modal is confined to the window or tab it exists in and when you leave the page you're on it goes away.
If the website is honestly just a bunch of scraped content which solely exists to solicit donations then go ahead. But if there is another purpose, any other one, than the popup dialog detracts from it in an unnecessarily injurious way.
In the meantime, the rest of us will learn to write greasemonkey rules for those popovers and the next generation of adblockers will evolve.
Jordan Coeyman's OptKit is a light but intelligent popover tool that actually works, and I signed up for his newsletter based on how well the tool worked on his blog.
Ironically, it's the proliferation of unnecessary third-party tools (as described in [1]) which is a major source of the web slowness described in the original article.
[1] linked from the article: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/tools-dont-solve-the-webs-problems/
Or are the statistical signals not strong enough to distinguish them from user-requested pop-overs like "I want to login"?
For a less "nuclear" option, use Adblock Plus. And this suggestion might help the defaults a bit: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27776
And if that doesn't work, get Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey and write your own by playing around with the debug console. (Chrome: Shift-Alt-C or Shift-Cmd-C - firefox: similar...)
This is actually very very useful, but every single implementation is bad. Ideally your browser would have all this figured and allow you to one click sign up for the newsletter. The popup should be noticeable, but away from the content (above the reading area).
Yes. I've personally seen seen multiple A/B tests on different sites showing newsletter popups to be highly effective on both a rate and absolute basis. Their increase in conversion rate is more than enough to offset the (tiny) number of users who leave because of them. (We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.)
That being said, good publishers should cookie that you closed the popup and not bother you about it again. I imagine the numbers on this would also be different for a technical audience.
As many have pointed out, most are unlikely to subscribe to the newsletter/install the app/whatever before they've even seen the site.
It seems like the least annoying way to do this would be to detect multiple visits (preferably over multiple days) and then ask for the signup. If the person says no, don't show it to them again for a very long time, if ever.
"We also ran this A/B test over multiple weeks to see if it had an effect on return frequency. It didn't.)"
Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are?
We actually tested that as well (though I think we did it after 6 pages). The conversion rate was of course higher than showing it immediately, but the users didn't open or click any more frequently. (Hence, showing "immediately" on first page load is better business-wise.)
> Does your A/B test detect how annoyed the readers are?
Haha, that is indeed why I pushed against this in the first place (if I hadn't, we wouldn't even have tested it so thoroughly). But the fact that such "annoyance" didn't show up in any metrics ultimately won me over.
One thing to keep in mind is that I've only tested with non-technical users, who I think are in general much less annoyed by this sort of thing than the typical HN person.
Specifically, sales and product people who neither understand nor care about user experience. These are the kinds of people who say yes to every deal, since the only metric they are judged by is quarterly income. Typically these people are also (rightfully so) terrified of losing their jobs. So they close tons of ad deals, by which point it's too late for the developers to stop them.
Back when I worked for Newsweek they were the biggest barrier to a quality user experience. The site developers wanted to built and the site had to was the main reason I left that industry behind.
In theory, reconciling these opposing forces should be what top management does. In reality, top management is usually too terrified to do so, because they're subject to the same pressures the sales people are: they have corporate masters of their own, demanding a revenue chart that always drives up and to the right, who will cheerfully throw them overboard the moment they appear to not be 100% behind that goal. So it's ads ahoy and UX take the hindmost.
I think that's shortchanging developers. They know where the money is coming from and if the company has good incentive structures (ie. equity) want to make sure revenue grows as well.
Fortunately, developers are also aware of the cost which is associated with every third-party tool included on the page. That's why it's really important to include someone technical in any deal conversation as early as possible, and they need to have the ability to block a deal which would substantially degrade the user experience. They can also weigh different providers by their implementation cost to users, which is crucially important: a sales guy loves to hear "just one line of JS" but I'd much rather use a REST API.
The key to getting this sort of control and buy-in is demonstrating to management the fact that page load time has a direct effect on traffic (and thus revenue).
We see a small microcosm of this in software development. Big, lumbering software firms that spent millions of dollars getting very little done end up with teams that have separate DBAs, frontend programmers, backend progrmmers, testers, business analysts, project managers, software architects, build specialists... Lots of jobs, lots of people, and none of them really has value to the company in their mind. In comparison, a small company replaces that entire army with two people, and delivers cheaply and quickly.
Only through shared goals we ever get anything complicated done. This is what agile, lean and devOps are really about. Most of the rest is overperscriptive marketing.
Focus more on building the right product, than in building the product right.
The modern ad-filled web is devistating if you're not on broadband. A site like iMore (I think Gruber was too kind—I find the content to be regurgitated dreck) is unbrowsable for someone like my parents on a satellite internet connection: takes way too long to load, and costs quite a bit of money to view. They're not even rural, just a little too far for DSL, and the cable franchise agreement isn't required to cover them. I understand that content creators have bills to pay, but you're shooting yourselves in the foot re your available viewership when you take it to the extreme of iMore. It's easy to pick on iMore, but it's the same story for many other websites.
I think the day when everyone is on (or can get access to) an unlimited (or unlimted-enough) broadband connection will come first
Being on the far end of DSL service is pretty bad also. 1.5mbps down isn't fun on the modern web. At that point blocking plugins like flash and running an ad blocker is pretty much mandatory.
Essentially, he's arguing that the refusal of most readers to pay for content combined with the way advertising has made the web suck -- and is encouraging an ever-larger number of people to block advertising entirely -- is creating a scenario that leaves one practical option: driving content off the open web. This is exactly what Facebook's Instant Articles, Apple News, Flipboard and similar services are betting on -- creating environments where loading times are much faster, the reading experience is generally more pleasant, and advertising is by and large less intrusive than what we're increasingly ending up with on the web:
The future for most publishers is likely that of pure content production only, save for the few who are destination sites capable of selling native advertising in stream or selling subscriptions. What is very much in question is exactly how users will feel when they finally get what they claim they wish for.
This ultimately isn't a question about AdBlock and loading times, it's a question about how to pay for content. If neither of the predominant payment models on the open web -- advertising and subscriptions -- turn out to be viable, if we want content producers to stay on the open web we need to come up with better answers than "hey, I'm sure there will always be people out there willing to produce everything we want at the highest possible quality level without worrying about how they'll get money for it."
It's not just adverts, though - the amount of pointless javascript on web pages these days is almost embarassing. The concept of optimizing web pages for quick loading and judder-free browsing seems to be completely lost on today's web designers.
We're getting to here: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/idiocra...
Corporation will push you content from their sever, including agressive advertisements.
It's (sadly) up to the user to filter them on his browser, on the front-end.
I manually disable my ad blockers on websites I choose as appropriate. The minute one of those website use an agressive ad that covers the content or a popup, it goes back on the blacklist.
Also completely agree. I find myself wanting the internet back from before all injecting all this JS became popular. I know that's going to make many JS guys pissy, but it's true.
I'd rather see people just rely on simplicity and HTML. The web should be about hyperlinked document sharing and simple data/storage retrieval frontends like github and email. That was the original use-case and shoehorning in more today is clearly just pissing people off.
Going too far beyond this with flashy designs kill usability, speed and productivity. I'm frequently having to cut down Google's attempts at messing up my Gmail with constant new JS features. I'd probably prefer just HTML Gmail too (https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h) if they'd just do a little touch up work on it such as the ability add contacts. It's not missing much but is so performant and just what I need.
My general rule is if you can achieve what you need with just HTML, then stop there. That would probably be fine for 90% of the sites out there like my email and HN.
What I really hate are site pop-ups that suddenly interrupt reading and play hide and seek with the "close" option. That's the last way to get my feedback or make me a subscriber. but it must work!
Akin to a "Donate" button on a website. How well does that work for most?
But what people are willing to pay for is additional value for programs they already know – 60€ a year to get HD instead of SD quality is worth it for many.
(Also, we have the largest tax-financed TV industry worldwide, even larger than the BBC with over 120 channels, but it’s worth it)
My local newspaper has an atrocious website with terrible load times, obtrusive ads and confusing navigation. But it is the only game in town.
Then charge me. I didn't agree to watch ads, and have no obligation to do so.
[1] Pretty sure it was Ferriss's Four Hour Work Week
Sponsored posts, subscription models, premium services/special access, shops/merchandise, donations/flair. Saying advertisement is the "one avenue" is lying through clenched teeth.
The issue is that few people value journalism (and not surprisingly given the falling levels of journalism found everywhere nowadays). If I get a report on a war breaking out on Egypt does it matter if I read it in the New York Times or see it trending on Twitter? Not really. Most people are more than happy enough to share news for free and I can likely hear it from a family member or friend. To most people, it doesn't really matter who they end up hearing it from.
The only reason they turn to popular news sources is because they are in-their-face and they know they exist. I might have trouble finding a random Russian blog about the Ukraine conflict written in English. But CNN's coverage of the conflicts will do and is easily accessible. Does it matter to me which source I use? Not particularly if the information is more or less the same.
You are ignoring the import of the very line you quoted: to demand the web to be free. While there are exceptions, in general people do not like to pay for web content, which includes subscription models, premium services/special access, and donations/flair. Sponsored posts are advertisements.
> If I get a report on war breaking out in Egypt does it matter if I read it in the New York Times or see it trending on Twitter?
If it is trending on Twitter, to read the report you must click a link which goes to a web site that needs to pay its writers.
> Most people are more than happy enough to share news for free
From a source that needs to pay its writers.
> and I can likely hear it from a family member or friend.
Who heard about it from a source that needs to pay its writers, right?
> But CNN's coverage of the conflicts will do and is easily accessible.
CNN is, well, a source that needs to pay its writers. And they do so through advertising. Because we demand the web to be free.
>If it is trending on Twitter, to read the report you must click a link which goes to a web site that needs to pay its writers.
This doesn't even deserve a response for how blatantly wrong this statement is, but I'll humor you.
I can guarantee that during any major event I can find 1,000's of tweets covering the topic in extraordinary detail (ie: photos and videos taken by the people involved) without ever having to go to a news article and without any of those tweets mentioning an article. Hell, most news nowadays is centered entirely around finding these type of tweets and writing an article about the information in these tweets.
Browse tags related to Ferguson for all of 10 seconds to see how wrong you are.
>From a source that needs to pay its writers. && >Who heard about it from a source that needs to pay its writers, right?
My mom told me there was a fire by my house a few weeks back. The source was she saw smoke in the hills in my general direction and used a bit of guessing as to the location of the fire, which was indeed a few blocks from my residence. No writers had to be paid for my mother to take this news and relay it to me. It was entirely free! Once-upon-a-time this was how almost all news was relayed! Who'd have thought this methodology still works and is still reliable thousands of years later!
>CNN is, well, a source that needs to pay its writers. And they do so through advertising. Because we demand the web to be free.
But nothing is stopping me from finding another news source (ie: the hypothetical Russian blogger I mentioned) and following whatever they say instead of CNN, other than I don't already know they exist. Which with crowd-sourced news (more or less what Twitter is) is amazingly easy to find. If I cared enough about the Ukraine conflict I can find 20+ sources that I could cross-compare and get an accurate idea of what is occurring without a single writer needing to be paid. Just people wanting to be heard.
Believe it or not - but news is not something that needs to be paid for. The only reason that news pays is that there are people who want to share a story, people willing to listen, and advertisements that can be shoe-horned inbetween broadcasting segments. "The news" often gets its "sources" from unpaid people willing to share their story. They are a middle-man who can be cut out of the deal.
Journalism is a form of news that is supposed to be "curated" to give an unbiased, full perspective of an issue and allow the reader to come to their own conclusions. I treat it as an art-form to tell a story in a captive and informative way. It's a dying art form.
I don't apologize for my tone because your response came off as extremely narrow-visioned with an extremely annoying and self-affirming (but wrong) argument of "the source came from writers, didn't it!"
I have a blog where I write about topics important to me because I want people to be aware of them. I am a news source, I don't expect (or need) to get paid for my time spent writing on the issues. I'm not the only person like this, there are thousands of people like me. Thousands? I meant millions.
But that's just the issue with paying for journalism, I went off on a secondary topic about paying for news (more general).
My argument was that Fox News and most other mainstream media covering mostly trivialities and unimportant things could be replaced entirely by following trending topics on Twitter and one would miss nothing that actually matters. Any major events would be covered by the general public.
On that note, AdBlock Plus gets a lot of heat for having an "acceptable ads" list, and I never understood why. I don't mind advertising, either, so long as it doesn't degrade my user experience, and that's what ABP has been shooting for.
No, ad-blockers are necessary because ads (as they exist right now) are security risks that negatively impact performance and the the user experience of the site.
I'm more than happy to disable my ad-blocker on sites that I trust and appreciate, but they are only a tiny fraction of the sites I visit. Either wise up and provide a sane and trustworthy user experience, or wither as your revenue vanishes.
There's no inherent reason why so much of the cost of ad networks, tracking (regardless of the arguments about tracking itself), and ad content needs to be born by the user. Better ad stacks should, and probably already do, exist, but it seems like most publishers and ad networks are lazy, incompetent, or both, and with iOS9 they'll soon see that they've shot themselves, and everyone else, in the foot.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_SE_YM1/
An article from the site it complains about sure uses a lot more bandwidth (2.9mb) but at least it's visible/readable in 2.2 seconds:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_KC_YQK/
The bandwidth/resource waste sure sucks but having ads load asynchronously isn't as bad as a blank screen for 5 seconds.
[1]: https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...:
This struck me. I think it's the other way around: Users should be respectful of advertising, or, since this sounds ridiculous: Pay for content. Everything else seems unsustainable (and the status quo seems pretty unsustainable, hence 1 minute tracking traffic).
I'm wondering if the free-everything web only evolved due to the lack of a proper built-in payment method or if there is an underlying economic reason (the near-zero cost of publishing?) that would have forced the current situation anyway.
It is unrealistic to expect or hope that the supply content should be restrained. The other side of the equation is advertiser demand, and that is restrained by complexity at this present moment: The best DSPs (demand side platforms, or ad-buying tools) are typically met with very high minimums (10K/month to 250K/year) because the cost of supporting advertisers with account reps is so high. Yes, ad tech stacks are also pretty damn hard to build, but most at this point are built for scale.
My vision for my company is to democratize the advertising process so that access to the best tools, talent, and strategy is available to anybody with a message to share. If we can pull that off well, anybody that aggregates a quality audience with media should be able to benefit from their effort. Eventually individuals should be able to freely pay for the content they choose with their attention itself, detached from the act of consuming a specific piece of content.
*Note: I did not in any way say frameworks and libs are unnecessary. I know people will read it that way, however, so this is to clarify for them.
http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-we...
Via decentralized applications, we're seeing that we can build services that are not powered by hungry corporations which sponsor segregation, unethical behaviors, inequalities, competition and destruction. Instead they're powered by the people that use them.
I used to have AdBlock in the mix, but I develop web sites, and sometimes you actually need to have a div called "ad" or "adv" when you're integrating other people's code. It's hard to develop sites when those divs just vanish.
The editor, Rene Ritchie, has a following. He was relatively early to iPhone punditry, and there is a perception that his opinions are well-founded.
[citation needed]
Sure there's a lot of sites out there with ridiculous page sizes, but I'd hardly call 10+MB "the norm".
I had to chuckle at that.