Someone on LinkedIn asked why so many websites are mediocre. Here's my answer...
Usability is hard. Desktop UIs constrain the development team to a certain look and feel, e.g. a button looks like a button, a drop down looks like a drop down. The web offers no such constraints, and a weaker set of interactions, though with AJAX things are getting better. So, every time you go to a new website you have to learn a new UI, making the overall experience mediocre. People often forget that they put up a site to tell a story. The story might be "This is who we are" or "Look at our lovely widgets, you really should buy them", but it's a story none the less. Actually, because of hyper-linking it's several interwoven stories that have to work together. That's hard to do, and often the developers/designers/site owners lose focus on the broad goals of the site and get caught in the minutiae of over-clever design or trying to control the user's experience. Think how many e-commerce sites you've seen that actively get in their own way and make it difficult to complete the sale. As someone else mentioned, a lot of websites are DIY, that's the history of the web. Back then it was ok because the best the average person could do was black text on a white background and lots of pictures of cats, but with the point and click tools available today you can build a monstrosity of a site pretty easily.
So, the moral of the story is it's hard to stay focused and build a good, usable website even for professionals, and amateurs have almost no chance. If you're going to try and build it yourself, keep your story tight, do less instead of more whenever possible, and remember that your users can come into your story on any page, and they can leave just as abruptly. |
