[h84ru3a]

It's web developers that are responsible.

It's a little like advertising perhaps. Advertising has become more of an art form than a tool. Awards given for achievement in creating ads are based on the perceived artistic value of an ad, not on its market effectiveness.

Web development is viewed as an art form by web developers. The web is not a tool to them. It's a canvas.

But the reality is that for many users in many cases, the web is a tool. They just want to accomplish some task, and they are not going to pay attention to artistic value.

Maybe a good example is Amazon. Many web developers criticise the site's design. But Amazon is doing just fine. Because users do not visit Amazon for an "experience". They visit it to buy things.

Maybe there should be two versions of every website: 1. an artisitic one aimed at "user experience" where the developer could display their design skills and 2. another aimed at getting some task(s) done, quickly and efficiently. The latter might follow some universal standard. No thinking involved in its "design", just following a spec.

The user could choose. The problem for the author of this blog post was she had no choice.

[Domenic_S]

> It's web developers that are responsible.

No way. It's marketing people who are responsible. Obvious example: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

At the level that Camper (or Amazon) is operating on, the marketing department holds all the cards when it comes to the web site. The web devs mostly decide how to implement, but they're operating at the behest of marketing.

[h84ru3a]

In general, do marketing people know how to create websites?

If not, how can they even know what is possible to create using HTML, CSS, etc.?

If the answer is "they look at what the competition is doing," then how did the marketers at the competitor know what is possible?

It has to start somewhere. Who was behind the web back in 1993? Marketing departments? Are marketers the ones who know what can be done with HTML, etc., and what cannot?

If a marketing department asks a web developer to implement something that the developer knows will be an annoyance to end users, and then he decides to tell them it is not possible, does the marketing department not accept this answer? "Look, we know how to make websites, we know this can be done and we'd do it ourselves if we had the time, but we're busy doing marketing. Either you do your job and build this site as we ask, or we'll find someone else."

So, at some stage, some web developer somewhere makes a decision.

I remember reading the confession of a talented developer who wrote, using mini scheme, stealth malware to serve pop-ups. His skills were so good that he could disable all competing malware; the competition was helpless. The NY Attorney General later shut down his employer on consumer protection grounds. The developer was not typically an author of malware, and knew what he was doing was wrong, but his excuse for working with this outfit was that he needed a job.

Without that developer making a choice, the malware company would never have known it was possible to do what they were able to do with the help of this particular talented developer. The use of mini scheme, self modifying code and disabling all competing malware were not in his "job description". He showed them what was possible. And surely they loved him for it. But how about the users infected with the malware, who had to see his employer's pop-ups every day with no way to "turn it off"? What would they think of his work?

Just something to think about.

[Domenic_S]

> how can they even know what is possible to create using HTML, CSS, etc.?

Anything is possible. It doesn't mean a particular idea is good (see: the topic website), but anything is certainly possible.

> It has to start somewhere. Who was behind the web back in 1993? Marketing departments?

For big companies? Yes.

> Are marketers the ones who know what can be done with HTML, etc., and what cannot?

Implementation is beside the point. Even if the Camper "experience" in the original link loaded quickly and was implemented perfectly, it would be bad.

> If a marketing department asks a web developer to implement something that the developer knows will be an annoyance to end users, and then he decides to tell them it is not possible, does the marketing department not accept this answer?

This is the difference between a good marketing department and a bad one. The good ones will take the feedback and the bad ones won't. It's also the difference between a good organization and a bad one -- if the org makes it a habit not to talk to engineers until the idea has gone through revision after revision, UX, etc, then there's too much inertia to overcome (say, 3 months of designing, UX development, intended to be launched in tandem with a meatspace campaign, as an example).

For giant companies, the web site is a piece of their action, and often times not the largest piece. The web team (the ones who implement) are pinned to the timelines of other rollouts (in-store campaigns, billboards, magazine ads, tv ads, and so forth). So while a certain idea might not be best, there may not be time to change it -- or (consider this) the web experience might not be the most important to a company that does 80% of their volume in meatspace.

Thinking that the web site & web team should be the gatekeepers of customer experience in a multichannel business that isn't focused online is a myopic view. In spirit I'm right there with you dude, but in practice (can you tell I've worked at giant companies?) it doesn't work that way.

[h84ru3a]

If you're with me in spirit, I take that to mean I'm not "wrong", I'm just unrealistic, a dreamer, etc.

I think web developers have a lot of power over how the web operates. Much more than marketing departments.

In the spirit of making money, I'm right there with you. Web developers have to eat.

But to think the matter of the web's usability, or unusability (what the blog post described), is out of their hands, and solely in the hands of marketing departments, I don't buy it. Marketing has the budget, they do not have the skills, or even the knowledge.

I see numerous examples year after year that show that both large and small companies do not have the first clue how stuff works or what the implications are on end users. Developers present them with a proposition and the company writes a check. When some egregious practice comes to the attention of the press, the companies often have no idea what they were even paying for -- they do not understand what was being done.

One need only look at SEO and the types of websites it produces. It's quite a stretch to try to hold marketing departments responsible for this state of affairs.