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by AriaMinaei 2958 days ago
Web pages used to be amazingly creative, with terrible usability. Now they're the exact opposite. Usability is good, but they all look the same.

I wonder what social sciences have to say about this. About public opinion swinging from one extreme to the other, never seeming to be able to land on the sane middle.
3 comments
ptx 2958 days ago
The used to be plenty of sites with great usability, in the style the FOX Toolkit website[1] still uses. Everything you expect is listed in a simple static menu to the left, requiring no hovering, no scrolling, no additional navigation. It's not trying to guide you to what they're guessing most people want (while hiding the things you actually want) with gigantic colorful buttons.

Today's "usable" websites seem to consist mostly of gigantic irrelevant photos, huge expanses of whitespace, and navigation consisting of buggy JavaScript puzzles for the user to trick into showing correctly.

[1] http://fox-toolkit.org/

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petra 2958 days ago
It's about maturity - trying many forms(creativity) and finding the forms that work(i.e. sell, bring search traffic) and reusing them over and over. The general process happens in many industries. and i don't think it will return to the wild creativity phase.
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krapp 2958 days ago
Let's take the nostalgia goggles off though... the old web was more colorful, certainly less uniform, but I wouldn't call it "amazingly creative." Most of those sites tended to look a lot alike as well, especially on Geocities.
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