Why are so many web sites so bad?

The 'bad design' problem has several causes:

  1. Computer screens strain the eyes.
  2. There is no single design tradition for web designers to draw upon. See analogies.
  3. First generation websites were designed by engineers (nerds) with no more concern for users than mosquitoes have for humans
  4. Second generation websites were designed by graphic experts with little understanding of engineering considerations and little concern for users.
  5. Third generation websites were designed by business people. Some flaunt a marble-shopfront approach. Others a pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap approach.
  6. Fourth generation websites are designed by squabbling alliances of First, Second and Third generation web warriors.
  7. Most texts on web design confuse the issues by attacking everyone on the field, justifiably, and then barking out the author's sharp commands
  8. Websites, being cheap, do not enjoy the merciful early death of most badly designed products.

There have conventions for the design of shops, libraries, books, directories, magazines, auction houses and political leaflets. Websites do all these things, looking all different and all the same. Its hell-on-screen. And its difficult to think of a comparative field of design which is quite so ghastly. The necessary conditions are

So here are some comparatives:

  1. Army Food (1944) [no consumer issues, low production costs, some technical issues with mass production]
  2. Communist Block cars [no consumer issues but low costs and many technical problems]
  3. Holiday Snaps
  4. Public Parks
  5. Junk mail for Junk Food

The last item on the list is the nearest comparison. It does not really satisfy the technical complexity criterion but think of examples from your local pizza restaurant. They come close to web design.

One encouraging consideration is that the design of successful websites is now significantly better than the design of unsuccessful websites. But there are still enough horrors in a typical page of Google returns to freeze, or boil, the blood. The design standard is nowhere near as high as that of books and other print publications. Jacob Neilsen comments on the comparative advantages of books and websites.  The quotation below is reproduced, with the author's permission from the 2000 text of his Designing web usability (published by New Riders Publishing).

I am a usability expert, so my choice of medium is governed by what is most usable for a given communications goal and not by what is most in fashion at any given time. Of course, the Web is a great communications medium (that’s why I am writing about it), and it is well suited for shorter documents with many links (I have many such pages on my website, www.useit.com ) . The Web is not good for very long documents that need to present a steadily progressing argument.

If you really want to learn about a topic, it is still better to do so by reading a coherent, in-depth treatment of the topic written from a single perspective than to bounce among multiple shorter ideas and different perspectives. In other words, a book is still better than the Web for the goal I want to achieve: to get readers to understand the usability perspective of web design.

Three conditions would have to happen for me to give up writing books:

•  Computer screens must improve to the point where reading from screens is as fast and as pleasant as reading from paper. I am confident that this will happen around the year 2002 for high-end computers and 2007 for mainstream computers, because such screens have already been demonstrated in the lab.

•  Web browsing user interfaces must improve enough that it is as easy to navigate the Web as it is to leaf through the pages of a book. I am more skeptical on this count because browser vendors currently seem to invest more efforts on useless multimedia and advertis­ing schemes than on helping users navigate; but even so, we might get useful browsers by the year 2003.

•  Readers and writers must both adjust to non-linear information spaces, that is, how to write in ways that utilize hypertext and how to read without the safety of mind that comes from making no decisions beyond turning the page. Nothing but time and plenty of experience and exposure to well-crafted hypertexts will make this change happen. Unfortunately, there is a chicken-and-egg problem in that well-crafted hyper­texts will not happen until good writers have become skilled in writing hypertext. I expect good hypertext writing to happen in greater quantities as the Web matures, around the year 2001, and the emphasis irrevocably changes from dazzling people with the novelty of a new medium to satisfying user needs.

Vincent Flanders invites us to 'learn good design by looking at bad design'. Its fun and his site, at http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/suckframe.htm both entertained and instructed the first generation of web designers.

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