The UI design world has gone crazy. A few arbitrary trends have become nearly ubiquitous despite being universally annoying. Why is annoying your potential customers so popular?
The most obvious feature of websites today is the inevitable popup that the designers shove in your face before you’ve even had a chance to view the rest of the site. (Perhaps even worse is the variant where they give you 10 or 20 seconds to settle in and start digesting their content, only to interrupt you with the popup then). Enjoying our site? I just got here. Give me a chance to form an opinion. Like us! Subscribe! Get a discount! Now or never!
These popups are so infuriating I wish I could choose to simply never again visit any site that assaulted me in this way. But if I did that, I’d need to give up using the web entirely. The practice is nearly universal. Why is there no innovation or differentiation in this area on different websites? It would be a competitive advantage to offer a peaceful website that didn’t use popups. There are plenty of other ways to offer discounts or solicit newsletter subscriptions. I seriously doubt these popups are the most effective.
I know popup blockers exist, but they have drawbacks. Sometimes they block functionality I want. Sometimes websites detect popup blockers and refuse to work. Plus, why should I need third-party protection? Why don’t websites use techniques that actually make the sites appealing and easy to use? The most successful websites in the world (think Google and Amazon) don’t use popups.
Note that I’m not talking here about the “We use cookies” notices that every web site employs. They have no choice about this because it’s legally required by Europe’s GDPR law. This well-intentioned but ultimately annoying and useless provision has increased privacy and data control by exactly zero for the average user while degrading our web experience.Hover everything. So many websites do stuff when you hover over things on the screen. Menus that expand on hover are the most prevalent, but often hovering over an item on a list is used as a sort of soft selection that causes additional information to be displayed. Some video sites will even start playing the video if you hover over it for too long. Perhaps most annoying is buttons that don’t show up unless you hover over the right area of the screen. How were we supposed to know this option was available like this? Do you expect us to hover over the entire screen to try to discover what commands are available?
The main problem with hover everything is that it’s not safe to leave your cursor anywhere. You have to actually spend time to find a safe place to rest your cursor so you can actually view the website without interference.
And since hovering isn’t even possible with a phone or tablet, why would anyone build in hovering as a major component of their site?Flat design. This disease affects the Windows operating system perhaps even more than it affects web sites. In my opinion, Windows design peaked with Windows XP. In those good old days, you could tell a button was a button because it had a 3-D appearance that looked like a physical button. Old websites worked the same way. In this way, the computer was adapting itself to the way our minds work in our everyday world. Nowadays, button-like UI widgets are distinguished from inactive elements by more subtle characteristics like fonts and layout. The only way you can know for sure if a UI element is clickable is to hover over it and see if it changes in a way that says “click me”. We are forced to learn the “design language” an OS or website uses in order to become effective with that interface.
Flat design not only makes interfaces difficult to learn, it can make them completely unusable. Now that Windows title bars and borders are completely flat and colorless, it’s impossible to tell where one window ends and the next one begins.
And since different UI elements are all flat and as colorless as possible, it’s not easy for websites to become beautiful and differentiated from each other. Why is flat design so ubiquitous? Why no innovation or differentiation?
The “why” question about these UI design trends is pretty confusing. My theory is that the designs are being driven from the technical side and decisions are being made based on what’s possible and easy to implement instead of from the design and marketing side driven by what would create a great user experience.
I think my theory is supported by the way “exit intent” popups appeared on the web all at once like a fit of collective hysteria. These are the popups that appear when you quickly move your cursor towards the part of the screen where you can switch and close tabs. Wait! Don’t go! Why don’t you like us? Please like us! We’ll do anything if you don’t leave! You’ll be sorry if you leave now! Please do free labor to tell us how to do our jobs better!
One day in 2012, somebody figured out how to determine exit intent and this mechanism spread like wildfire since it met an existing need in traditional marketing, namely customer retention. They actually use phrases like “page abandonment” to describe user behavior. Feel insecure much?
Does anyone actually respond to these desperate and disruptive UI features? I expect very few do. But it must be non-zero, or else nobody would use them, just like how spam and junk mail wouldn’t exist if zero people responded to them. But is it really worth it to them to receive these few conversions at the cost of annoying everyone else? I read a few sources that say popups do indeed work, but that they’re not worth the cost. In addition to user annoyance, popups will lower your search engine rankings because Google penalizes the behavior. So it’s possible that design decisions are being made at least partially from the marketing side, but by dumb marketers.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much we can do about these annoyances. We’ll simply have to wait until some large company or explosive startup creates a new trend. How about “clean design” or “intuitive design”? Websites can do something called A/B testing, where they have two different site designs that are presented randomly to half of their customers. They can then measure which design performs better and then roll that out to everyone. Someday--soon, I hope--a major A/B testing result will show that these design trends provide an overall decrease in website performance. Amazon has proved that great user experience sells, so eventually others should come to their senses.
