splurt
March 13, 2008
Sitting there in the SXSW panel, I don’t even remember which one and it hardly matters anyway, I was overcome - and I do mean overcome, with attendant panicky feelings - that I can’t stand the web. I mean, I hate the web. No, not the web per se, but websites. If I see one more horizontal navigation bar, I think I’m going to scream. Like, out loud. They all look the same. It’s the same damn thing over and over and over again. I am so damn tired of it.
But there’s a problem with railing against all that sameness. The web needs horizontal navigation bars and/or left/right side navigation. It’s necessary for usability. Given the amount of stupidity I watch people exhibit each and every day, especially at airports, they simply cannot be relied on to think. Sameness in navigation makes the web work.
Take cars for example: there’s a seat, a steering wheel, a brake pedal and a gas pedal (and maybe a shifting system, but no one uses them anymore). I can get into just about any car and drive it without any time to come up to speed on its navigational system. Oh, it might take me a moment to find auxiliary things like the wipers or the gas tank door, but even with those, I have a good idea of where to look.
And so, my internal devil’s advocate says to me, a Mini Cooper looks nothing like a Hummer, so why are you complaining about websites all looking the same? And I say back to it, those are extreme examples - there are precious few design differences in the sea of boring family sedans and minivans and ’sport’ ‘utility’ vehicles. They all look the same, just like all those dull, boring, repetitive, but usable websites out there.
And then there is a tiny voice in the back which says “What about go-carts? What about airplanes?” (I have found that it is unwise to ignore this particular voice when it chooses to speak up. It’s the one that, at least sometimes, leads to Big Things.) A go-cart is Essence of Car, to my mind. Engine, wheels, navigation/speed control system, driver’s seat, that’s about it. How can I apply that to web site design? What if I strip everything away but the essence, then what can I do with it? A go-cart doesn’t look too much like a family sedan, but I bet most people could drive it. Go-cart engines are very close to the driver - what would that mean in site design? They’re also very low to the ground compared to regular cars - what would that mean to a site?
And airplanes. I don’t know how to fly one, but there are at least some similarities - some kind of directional control, some kind of engine/speed control, a driver’s seat. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take much instruction to learn what those controls are, even if it would take much longer to master them. So now we (my voices and I) are getting into the realm of vehicle control in an abstract sense. What does that mean to site design? If I were to provide abstracted site navigation, similar enough to regular navigation that a casual user could make a fairly accurate guess as to what the navigational tools might do, then what might a web site look like?
Don’t even get us started on boats.
People understand traditional website navigation now. It’s ingrained, it’s natural, needs no explanation. There must be a way to move to the next level. People figured out that ABS brakes work different from regular ones, they can figure out something new on the web, too. But what?
++++++
Or perhaps I just need a vacation from the web. SXSW was fun, but it sure as hell wasn’t that. In fact, it was the exact opposite of that.
Community and Privacy, Chermayeff and Alexander (1965):
“People want to be everywhere. The reason they moved out was to find the country and escape the disadvantages of the city. The reason they are moving back is that the country is no longer there and they would like to regain the advantages of the city. But when everything is everywhere, wherever you go there is nothing tangible to find.”
I’ll show you the gorgeous figures from this book next time we’re in the same spot.
there is some very lovely and funky web design from the mid-90s when it was still ok to do things which were Hypertext and odd and strange (because there was not enough prior art to signal otherwise). A very tiny few web sites like that are still around, they play more like interactive fiction and less like two-column newspaper narrative.
jeff stuit has one from long ago
- http://www.oldestlanguage.net/badmusic/
or perhaps this is just nostalgia for me, the pre-weblog web
[...] a later date | splurt (tags: web hate design convention form copy-exactly situation perception abstraction-upon-abstraction formal threshold liminal rant-of-the-week) [...]
“But when everything is everywhere, wherever you go there is nothing tangible to find.”
I love that.
Ed, I think you may have something in trying to look back at what the web look liked before navigation became standardized.
The book metaphor we use now, with its table of contents (nav bars) and index (search), has been useful while most web content is mostly static. It is mostly like traditional books and that works. But with dynamic content generation and crazy AJAX-y things to make stuff appear and disappear, the web is less and less like physical books. A book doesn’t generate a spontaneous extra page in the middle - and if it did, tables of contents and indexes would have to be very different than the way they are now.
The Wii is changing how people think about electronic game control. I’m not really that into gestures - that gets into hardware and we’re nowhere near ubiquity of gesture-aware physical devices - but it’s that kind of change I’m thinking of. Something way at the bottom of the stack, something fundamental.
Navigation, layouts - there must be better ways now that we have dynamic content.