Good read. As a web developer, over the years I’ve found that the “less is more” saying becomes truer by the day. Simplicity and straight to the point will always outdo the flashy and over the top.
And for what it’s worth, a trend I’d like to see leave the world of websites is the NEED to have homepage banner carousels. Literally no users stick around to see the second slide and beyond because they don’t care. The only people who care about the homepage banner carousels are the site owners. I said what I said :)
Super interesting read, thanks for sharing. Though it isn’t to say that you can have complicated designs AND low carbon websites, I do appreciate the benefit that the ‘less is more’ approach affords businesses.
I cringe a little for the planet when I scroll through a 50MB Webflow site that slows my MacBook to a crawl, and often wonder why so many companies throw endless sparkle and distraction in our faces, when they could instead project efficiency and simplicity.
What you've stumbled on is perhaps the latent pressure for recognizing websites as an art form. I doubt that amie.so's old landing page would have gotten it more users. I distinctly remember at the beginning of my design career scouring awwwards.com and believing those websites were the pinnacle of design, never mind the fact that I had to wait 20 seconds to load the page.
But it's hard to deny how beautiful those impeccably sculpted websites really are. Financial incentives suggest that functional ugly websites are better than aesthetic hard-to-use websites.
But I think most designers, and even laypeople, can appreciate the aesthetic quality of a great website. The unfortunate thing is that there's no money to support it, and the internet itself is collapsing into a series of social media websites, so most people won't even stumble on these websites if they did exist.
Nice post. I really like the design of https://gwern.net/ , a website by the writer Gwern Branwen. They were hyper focused on a rigorous functionality as they mention.
Good read. As a web developer, over the years I’ve found that the “less is more” saying becomes truer by the day. Simplicity and straight to the point will always outdo the flashy and over the top.
And for what it’s worth, a trend I’d like to see leave the world of websites is the NEED to have homepage banner carousels. Literally no users stick around to see the second slide and beyond because they don’t care. The only people who care about the homepage banner carousels are the site owners. I said what I said :)
Super interesting read, thanks for sharing. Though it isn’t to say that you can have complicated designs AND low carbon websites, I do appreciate the benefit that the ‘less is more’ approach affords businesses.
I cringe a little for the planet when I scroll through a 50MB Webflow site that slows my MacBook to a crawl, and often wonder why so many companies throw endless sparkle and distraction in our faces, when they could instead project efficiency and simplicity.
I feel ashamed that I was not thinking about it 😅
Craigslist looks 'good enough'. But, it is UX gold.
This was a great read and very interesting view to analyse.
I glad you liked it :)
What you've stumbled on is perhaps the latent pressure for recognizing websites as an art form. I doubt that amie.so's old landing page would have gotten it more users. I distinctly remember at the beginning of my design career scouring awwwards.com and believing those websites were the pinnacle of design, never mind the fact that I had to wait 20 seconds to load the page.
But it's hard to deny how beautiful those impeccably sculpted websites really are. Financial incentives suggest that functional ugly websites are better than aesthetic hard-to-use websites.
But I think most designers, and even laypeople, can appreciate the aesthetic quality of a great website. The unfortunate thing is that there's no money to support it, and the internet itself is collapsing into a series of social media websites, so most people won't even stumble on these websites if they did exist.
Nice post. I really like the design of https://gwern.net/ , a website by the writer Gwern Branwen. They were hyper focused on a rigorous functionality as they mention.
This is a great read for any designer. I think ease of use is forefront with design, especially product design.
Those are all websites I use Stylebot to spruce up a bit: https://imgz.org/i9RjETXY.png