David Poehlman wrote:
I've responded below marking my inserts with dp: I've left only those
portions in to which I have responded.
I've responded to your responses, for which I thank you. I'm guessing
that the inclusion of the remainder of my message after your last
response without any further response was accidental, but do let me know
if something got lost in transmission.
Designs, good and bad, have shaped current user expectations, along with
publisher habits and user expectations inherited from previous media
and computer information systems.
dp: what previous media?
All of them. Web applications try to fake desktop applications, web
games try to mimic offline videogames, web newspapers try to copy the
look of their print equivalents, promotional sites try to look like
magazine ads, video players try to copy the look of VCRs, and so forth.
till rather recently, I've never seen a print book, magazine,
newspaper or other construct video or audio which forces me to do
things like a lot of current design does.
As I don't know what things current design forces you to do, or how
other media might do something similar but doesn't in practice, I don't
know what to make of that.
One thing I would say is no previous media has been dependent on a
variety of non-compliant, buggy, and old devices and software the way
the web is. Sometimes we blame publishers when we should blame our tool
developers.
In fact, if design were truly bassed on past experience and design,
it might actually be better.
I said "design, good and bad". Some of the habits learned in other media
are useful and appropriate on the web too. But not all of them.
Bad things included a WYSIWYG editing model and mindset rather than
editing suited to producing structured, semantic, navigable, media
independent markup. The sort of habits of thought which faked headings
with bold text rather than heading markup, or used quotation markup for
indenting text rather than quotations. These habits of thought come
straight out of the production of print media.
An addition to millimeter-perfect layout is another bad hangover from
previous media. I can't count the number of times publishers have said
to me that they need to use tables-for-layout, or images-for-text, or
complicated Flash contraptions or something else suboptimal because they
can't allow the site to look different on different systems, and put
forward the argument that different copies of a book don't vary
depending on who reads them, so neither should websites.
When the web was first being designed, it did just that; designing on good
previous models with the new concepts of true hypertext added which seems
now to be a factor overlooked in the rush to design the most glitzy and top
heavy bloat possible since they use hi res screens and high bandwidth to
base their designs around.
Publishers certainly sometimes aim for "glitz", if by that you mean
adopting designs and even features that they think to be fashionable,
either hoping that they are fashionable because they are good, or that
they will appeal to end-users simply because they are fashionable.
Publishers do make guestimates about the resolutions and bandwidth of
their target audiences; sometimes these guestimates are wrong and often
they fail to make sufficient accommodation for the atypical minority
even when they are right. Resolution mismatches tend to be worse than
bandwidth mismatches, in so far as the first can render content
impossible to consume whereas the second just makes it boringly slow.
However, there's no fundamental reason you can't have "glitz" as well as
supporting any resolution and bandwidth. The technology stack supports that.
To go back and change a design used throughout the web would be
monumentally difficult and expensive. But it is a linear, technical job.
Changing a design for one website is roughly the same as changing a
design for the next.
dp: That may be, but if a user starts seeing sites built along good
structural and style lines, they will first expect that site when they
revisit it to remain the same just as it does now and be looking for sites
that mirror this ease of use.
Basically, yes, though I don't really see how that modifies what I was
saying.
"Good structural and style lines" are not Platonic Forms from the Realm
of Abstract Ideas. They also need to take account of real
flesh-and-blood human beings, and that includes taking account of their
expectations and habits. There's a feedback loop in operation there,
where expectations shape "ease of use". If you expect a bit of helpful
navigation in the top left of the page, and you instead have to scroll
right to the bottom of the page to find out where you are and where else
you can go, your reaction to that as a human being is not necessarily:
"Hey, this is more logical! I wish more sites did this." Your reaction
could equally be: "Stupid site doing things differently to every other
known site in the universe! I'll just go somewhere else next time."
There's no immediate payoff to the hunt for navigation, so if anything I
think the second reaction is more likely. This, of course, assumes you
bother to hunt around for the navigation in the first place rather than
pressing the Back button at once, which is a huge assumption.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
