I just miss organization. Everything feels like a mess now. Content is either in an endless scroll or it's only accessible through a search box and you have absolutely no idea whether the site doesn't have the content you wanted or if you just failed to use the correct terms. Increased reliance on CDNs and cross-site content has simultaneously made web pages expire faster than ever and made them harder to archive.
Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
I miss organization too. Every time I use Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc I feel at the mercy of the website as it shows me rocks one by one and I shake my virtual head "no.. no.. no.." until by chance something looks interesting. They have the metadata, why can't I browse by year or filter by director or actors, or any arbitrary combination of the available data?
And this is the same for news sites, where there should be a 20+ year history of articles but I can't browse it. And obviously social media where information is ephemeral and you only need to see what's happening right now. Shopping is ok on smaller sites, where inventory is static and items are either in stock or not. But earlier this year I could have snapped my keyboard in half trying to find a specific piece of hardware on the Lowes/Home Depot/Amazon website. There's no clear answer like "we don't carry that item" instead the search box vomits back all kinds of misinformation. Web Search itself might be the worst, only giving the most shallow corporate results, I'm not surprised it feels like there are few personal website when our index to the internet is so polluted.
All their idiotic sponsored results make finding things impossible.
For example, if I try to search for x, maybe I want to only see x from brand y.
They have an option for only brand y, yet sponsored results are immune to this.
Worse, lately, they now show different options as individual search results.
So, looking for a shirt I want, from brand x, has 1/2 the page filled with sponsored garbage, and often the rest with 7 colours of the exact same shirt, individually show.
Add to this, that search terms seem to be mild suggestions?
Well, if I am in the shirt category, search as above, but with a unique thing like turtleneck, I get a boatload of responses without any turtlenecks.
Obviously, some sellers are motivated to lie with their tags, but this isn't the only reason this isn't happening.
Add to this that most listings have no size chart, no fabric info, no origin location, or even conflicting info, and holy pita.
EG, I am not polyester friendly, yet some listings say things like 100% polyester, then the very next line, 95% cotton, 5% spandex.
Just 100% crap amazon!
All of this could be improved with more standardized listings controls and forms for sellers, and amazon has the cash and has had years to do it, too.
And lately, 20% of the stuff I order comes opened, used, even dirty.
I'm not paying new pricing for dirty clothes, amazon!
Especally shoes, socks, underwear (wtf?!).
I swear, walmart must have amazon moles, or is getting paid off / bribed by amazon, because a clown could do better against them.
Yes, and the viewing and sorting controls are deliberately manipulated. Sort by price low to high and suddenly the cheapest things don't show up. Enter a price range and the list is scattered with results much higher than your upper bound.
Are there no clothing-focused online shops in th US?
I prefer to buy clothes in-person, but I imagine Zalando etc. are way better than this at being an online clothes store. That's their whole raison d'etre, after all. Probably not available in the US though.
Netflix does this annoying thing where "Continue watching", "My list", "Trending now", and "Watch it again" appear in randomly different orders each time you log in. It would be like if Word randomly put the File menu on the right sometimes.
This is the most annoying thing. I am confident Netflix and others have data that this increases “stickiness” or some other made up engagement metric, but as a user, it just leaves me frustrated.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics—whenever a company relies too much on data to influences UX or content I feel like we end up with a bad UX and bad content that only superficially increases short-term engagement.
Data-driven decisions only go so far, IMO, and often the search for more data leads to blatant user privacy violations. Personally, I wish we could go back to the dictatorship-style UX: one person is ultimately in charge of UI. They have the final say in every UI decision for that application. At least that’s consistent!
This is a feature. The goal is to engage you with different/more content than you're aware of. The more time and content you consume from them, the more likely you are to keep paying.
Easy navigation of hierarchical/structured links just encourages visitors to turn sideways away from the content they are being funnelled towards.
The cattle farmers that currently run the web only want you clicking away once you’ve had a couple of opportunities to see ads, and it will be via some highly tuned clickbait “related links”.
But why wouldn’t they want you to spend more time on their site, you ask? Because people who are conducting a structured search for information will focus on finding that information, not on clicking the adverts. They are bad customers. What the farmers want is people who are only casually looking for information, who will be easily diverted to click on something else.
> But why wouldn’t they want you to spend more time on their site, you ask? (...)
Also: because if they can get you to spend only a few moments on their site, but do it every day, they're conditioning you into being a regular and loyal visitor. Intermittent rewards and all that. The person who spends more time and accomplishes all their goals will not come back until they actually need something from the site again.
>Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry
Don't knock encyclopedias/dead tree layouts. It's been a hell of an information transmission medium for centuries, and comes loaded with haptic shortcuts to aid recall and indexing.
I often call UX people on this when they want to do away with pagination and go to search bars. Yes, Boolean search is cool and all. Most people don't think in query languages for getting them all the way to where they are looking. They usually just want a starting set, then let them flip pages, or refine their query. Generally, when searching an unknown datastore, I like unrefined queries and manually perusing the data to get the lay of it by landmarking pages.
Point being, I still remember my first media center 101 on boolean searching, and my early years with search engines. To be honest, I feel like I got way more out of search indexes that didn't have agendas (piracy site suppression, artificially propping up marketing efforts, etc), than I do today.
I'm sure this is partially true but I don't remember it being the norm. I remember it being harder to find things (Netscape days, Altavista, etc), content embedded in Flash or jsp mess, low resolution, non interactive maps (let alone 3D), low quality audio and video 360p or worse. Dot matrix printing and just generally lower fidelity. Super slow connections requiring the phone line is totally incapacitated while using the net.
I agree that I can't find a recipe without an obnoxious amount of crap writing around it, at least it's there if I scroll far enough. Wikipedia, by the way, suffers almost none of the complaints I see here, loads extremely fast and is free (donate!).
So I guess what I'm saying is it could be better, but the Internet is pretty incredible still.
> So I guess what I'm saying is it could be better, but the Internet is pretty incredible still.
I don't think anyone with disagree with this. What really annoys people is the trend towards taking away more and more navigation power from the user and replacing it with "the algorithm". Everything is at the mercy of the algorithm and we (including its maintainers) are so ignorant about how it works that every advice I see out there is basically superstition.
> Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way.
Yes, I fondly remember the multimedia experience of Encarta and the likes.
Ableton's "Learning Music" is a pretty good modern example, though:
"Everybody's listening to podcasts! Quick, upload that 60+ minute Zoom call I had with that deeply inarticulate developer about the improvements in NodeJS!"
Lack of organisation has affected other areas of software too. An example is the gallery in Ios. It used to have an album called "camera roll" which would contain all the photos and videos taken by you. Now that is gone. You have absolutely no way to restrict your view to items that you captured. Instead it is a big jumble of random crap from whatsapp groups and screenshots and your captures all in one feed called "recents".
> An example is the gallery in Ios. It used to have an album called "camera roll" which would contain all the photos and videos taken by you. Now that is gone. You have absolutely no way to restrict your view to items that you captured.
This is incorrect. If you open ‘All photos’ and click on the 3-dot menu indicator, you can choose ‘Your Photos Only’ as a base selection for your filter.
As an aside, I find it incredibly annoying when people rant that “x is not possible in y software” when in reality they simply haven’t explored the application sufficiently carefully (and it’s not just about discoverability - this menu item is one level deep).
But this was something that was accessible by default, without going into any menus. And I would argue this is the most important function of the gallery app in any phone. Removing it and burying it is 100% an example of disappearance of organisation form software.
I believe that you have whatsapp autosave turned on by some default. You may visit whatsapp > settings > chats and turn it off there. I don’t know who thought that it is a good idea, but yes it’s really annoying. Otherwise, ios gallery is what you made or saved in there.
> Content is either in an endless scroll or it's only accessible through a search box and you have absolutely no idea whether the site doesn't have the content you wanted or if you just failed to use the correct terms.
What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
> Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.
Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
Were the annotations created by the site owner or by the community?
> What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
I think a big difference is the move away from folder-based organisational structures. Once upon a time, web sites were collections of HTML pages in a filesystem, and so a hierarchical organisation was natural; people started moving away from just a filesystem (or FTP server) into a CMS, but many older CMSes had a similar focus on folders as an organisational structure. It worked quite well in the hands of competent users, although there were always those people who didn't quite get it (or maybe just had poor attention to detail) and if left unsupervised they'd turn it into a big mess.
But then along came blogs, and suddenly there was a shift to posting content chronologically, with non-hierarchical tags; and as blog software (such as WordPress) came increasingly to be used as a CMS even for non-blog sites, that approach spread to CMSes as well. And I think it makes it harder to logically organise content, and it results in less focus and time spent on content organisation, and the end result is content becomes much harder to find. Blogging also encouraged an approach where people would create a new page rather than editing an existing one, resulting in an intermittent stream of disorganised piecemeal updates in response to new developments, rather than presenting all the information as a cohesive whole.
I think software (especially documentation) is one of the areas where we have this problem the least, because a lot of software people use tools (Git, Jekyll, etc) which still encourage hierarchical organisation. It is really non-software stuff, for example websites of government agencies, university administrations, corporations, etc, which have gone down-hill the most.
> Maybe I'm mentally blocked in thinking of the era of flash intros and marquee tags, but do you have any examples of sites that achieved what you're describing?
I don't remember many websites like that, but certainly a lot of multimedia CD-ROMs in the 1990s had that kind of design, and while there is no reason from a technological perspective why you couldn't replicate that style on the modern web, it just doesn't seem to be very popular.
The reason multimedia CD-type sites aren't made anymore is because of copyright and licensing costs. You can't store a video on your site that you don't own, but you can embed a Youtube link. Same goes with songs; embed a Spotify link.
It was a much more fluid experience on things like Encarta 97, where MS shelled out the money to license a lot of audio and video. It was completely offline, so there was no possibility of filling the article pages with iframes of content served by third party sites.
> What alternatives or solutions do you envision for search? How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
At the scale of Netflix? Start with a simple list of all titles in the catalog. One I can search with CTRL+F, or maybe narrow down with an incremental search, if you really have to do some fancy JavaScript in it.
It's not until we get into "Amazon scale" when the simple idea of giving people the whole dataset to look at breaks down.
The kind of operations done against most sites - whether it's a media streaming service or an on-line shop or an e-mail client or a planner - they all fall into a very common set of patterns. Filter by piece of information you know (like title, or genre; both "include matching" and "exclude matching"). Compare a bunch of candidates relative to a set of criteria (e.g. length, price, features X, Y, Z). Compare a candidate against a class in which it's in. Etc. Those are simple and universal patterns for dealing with data. Those are the interactions you want to expose if you actually care about your users achieving their goals.
The way I see it, most content services would've offered a much better UX if they just let you download the catalog as an Excel sheet, so that you can use a tool that actually tries to help you deal with data.
There's nothing about old web organization that takes away new web dynamism when added. Just give me a little "collections" link somewhere in a corner or at the bottom. Something I can click on and get everything you wrote on a particular topic. For example, if you're a game review site, let me see a list of every PC game you've reviewed sorted by date. Some sites have that but many don't anymore.
> How would you build a content heavy site in a way that gives a user confidence when searching for something?
Use Good information architecture:
1. Have breadcrumb links at the top of the page so the user can find their bearings quickly.
2. Use categories and tags carefully. Don't add irrelevant or imprecise tags to articles.
3. If your site has over 100 pages of content across multiple categories, consider doing user research to better understand how site users navigate your site and think about categories. This can be done using an exercise called card sorting, where users look at a list of pages (shown as individual index cards), and then organize the cards into categories that make sense to them. This can be done with pens and a handful of index cards, but large sites would probably use an electronic solution like Optimal Workshop to generate tests that can be done online, and crunch the numbers.
Static, indexable pages. Don't ever, ever build your own search, just use a google query with a site: filter. If that doesn't work, redesign your site.
Examples:
Basically any static page. Yeah, flash and marquee were annoying but you could just turn them off.
One of my favourite articles about web history. Really does a good job of explaining how we went from fully self contained websites, to chronogical blogs, and eventually to interconnected blogging on social media, and finally the non-chrono, algorithmically determined timeline.
Multimedia is also a shadow of what it once was. Twenty years ago it was common for material to be presented in a way that integrated text, sound, pictures, and video together in an easily navigable way. A page on, say, Lewis and Clark would offer you an audio introduction, an interactive map that brought up text journal entries for clickable points of interest, and relevant pictures. Now your only option is a web page with embedded pictures which may as well be a paper encyclopedia entry, or a video that may or may not offer you any useful way to navigate it aside from jumping around at random and most certainly doesn't give you rich annotations throughout.