
Design like it’s 1999 - oftenwrong
https://exclusive-design.vasilis.nl/design-like-its-1999/
======
notahacker
In 99, the screenreader would have serenaded him with visitor counters "This
website has had over [graphic without alt text] visitors since July 1997" and
"This site works best in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4" which isn't very
comforting when he's using a screen reader, and the whole website would be
laid out in a table, sometimes with menus that were sliced graphics instead of
text, or entirely javascript. Meanwhile the accessibility wing of the web
standardistas got so angry at people using font tags _instead_ of the
designated header markups that the font tag got deprecated when css browser
coverage was half decent. And let's not even start on Flash.

~~~
henriquez
Not to mention the prevalence of "Mystery Meat" navigation, where you couldn't
know what a graphical link did until you hovered or clicked on it.

[http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html](http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html)

(For whatever it's worth I still agree with the sentiment of the author here,
just worth pointing out that the 1990's weren't a panacea and that usable web
design has existed throughout history.)

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blowski
In my experience, many websites are an extension of their CEO's ego. They
don't have the money to build a website that is both unique and usable, but
there's no way they want to look everyone else - so they drop the requirement
to be usable.

They're the same people that drive impractical cars, because they look flashy.

~~~
sli
Yep.

CEO of our company didn't like the progress on one of our frontends, so he
took a weekend to write a whole new one himself, claiming it was "almost
done." It was, as you may predict, nowhere near done, but still shoved into
Git and became the new frontend.

In reality he seemed offended that he didn't know much about how we (the
frontend team) built it and he didn't like that, so he built the way he thinks
he knows, which turned out to just be a hodge podge of code from various
tutorials and no singular vision for how the application functions. There are
no less than three different paradigms in use in this codebase, and none of
them really play well together.

The end result is that it took us nearly as long as it took us to develop the
first version to bring the second version up to feature parity, but now we
have a giant mess of a codebase that was very strictly written to do exactly
the things the CEO wrote it to do. Predictably, development slowed to a crawl
pretty quickly because we're essentially forced to rewrite every single
individual piece that needs touching.

I told them this was a bad idea and would only make things take far, far
longer than finishing the one we had. The whole reason this was done? The CEO
and CTO found some bugs but didn't want to file them on the issue tracker.
They decided it was better that the CEO write his own, despite the CEO having
exactly zero experience with frontend development. This is just one of a long
line of bizarre decisions that I have accurately predicted would only cost us
more time and money than is worth it.

We're currently looking for new jobs.

------
JensRex
>Where did we go wrong?!

I think JavaScript is what started the downward spiral that ruined the web.
It's what enabled the shoehorning of the web browser into an application
framework. Now Google, Facebook and Amazon and a few others control it, and
are actively hostile against anyone who doesn't align with their interests.

~~~
pjc50
No, the real problem is a tension between standardised, accessible, boring
documents and the desire for flashiness. Being nonstandard helps a website
"stand out", and helps the designer sell it to the commissioner of the design.
Even if this doesn't help the actual users of the website.

Many customers have a sort of "print design" mentality where they want the
website to look a particular way on their device, preferably a pixel-perfect
match to something done in Illustrator. This was true in the Flash era, and
it's still true today - that's why you get restaurants whose menu is only
available as a PDF, a deeply mobile-hostile format, when _just putting it on
the front page_ would actually be easier and work better for the user.

~~~
userbinator
_that 's why you get restaurants whose menu is only available as a PDF, a
deeply mobile-hostile format, when just putting it on the front page would
actually be easier and work better for the user._

IMHO that's still better than making it an SPA, because the former at least
can be easily downloaded and viewed locally. Another example I've seen is a
recent redesign of a public transit site, where a simple HTML form and
directory of PDFs (literally --- it was just the webserver's directory
listing) for finding bus schedules was turned into an SPA that took a
disturbingly long time to load and was filled with, as the sibling comment
puts it, "flashy, user-hostile crap". The old design was unchanged since at
least 1999, if not slightly before.

~~~
buckminster
A local restaurant had their menu redone in React! Not just React, but React
done badly. Click on "Lunch Menu", say, and literally nothing changes for 30
seconds. Then the new page appears. I took a while to realise it wasn't
completely broken. God knows how much they paid for it. It's awful.

Edit: I should add, this reactivity serves no purpose. It's a sit down
restaurant. You can't order electronically.

------
MonaroVXR
>This is a nice example of how easy it is to make something usable for someone
like Simon. But it doesn’t really go beyond the usable. There is no
personality in it, and we didn’t really explore other possible solutions. In
the next chapter I will tell about the invisible animations I made together
with Hannes Wallrafen. In this project we went beyond the functional by
working with both identity and nonsensical ideas.

I don't agree, the site did it's job and it did it well. This isn't from a
company, so the personality isn't that important. The accessibility is more
important in this case.

~~~
AstralStorm
Think of it this way: for a screen reader, every bit of "identity" is a
screaming popup.

Even a simple image saying "welcome to x" gets old really quick. It is already
in the page title.

Narrative, linear, well delimited paginated interfaces like web search work
much better, magic autoloading infinite or overly long lists do not.

Short version: if it looks fine when styles, images are disabled, it's
probably ok, as long as it does not try to mess with input.

~~~
teddyh
Remember CSS Naked Day? It’s coming up now, on April 9th.

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userbinator
Using a website that seems to be focused on video content as a demonstration
of (in)accessibility for the blind seems a little unusual... perhaps something
like a news site --- which has lots of textual content --- would make a better
example.

~~~
juanuys
A blind person browsing a video site does not necessarily mean they want to
watch the videos. They might want to listen to the audio, or share the video
links they find.

------
nate
Reminded me of a quote from Paul Arden: "All creative people need something to
rebel against."

It's why things were simple and easy to understand in 1999. But then we all
rebelled making it more sophisticated and complicated on purpose. And then now
we all want to rebel against what we've done. The pendulum swings and swings.
I do prefer the 1999 version myself :)

------
michaelbuckbee
Here is a two-fold win: use the Vimium extension for navigating the web.

It lets you navigate web pages via keyboard shortcuts much faster than a
mouse.

Also, it readily exposes issues of non compliant links and navigation elements
that would also be missed by a screen reader.

~~~
nessunodoro
Shout out to one of my favorite projects, Luakit [^], the only chromeless
browser that lets me resize the window to a single pixel.

Best part is the vim interface,

    
    
      :open hacker news
      [ddg results]
      /Hack
      Enter
      :tabopen github top lua questions
      [Github search results]
      :bookmark
    

^ [https://github.com/luakit/luakit](https://github.com/luakit/luakit)

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Causality1
The same layout is not going to work best for both sighted and impaired
people. Attention spans are short and sight has an order of magnitude more
information bandwidth than hearing.

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GrumpyNl
He did pick one of the worst sites. The whole site is a design disaster with
lots of times not working vids.

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pliuchkin
"Toggle Accessibility" button forwarding to a clean page.

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username3
Sitemaps or screenreaders.txt

