<story><title>Simple Does Not Mean Ugly</title><url>https://uglyduck.ca/simple-does-not-mean-ugly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonathanstrange</author><text>To be honest, I have never encountered a website so far that even remotely had the same level of usability of a really good desktop application around the year 2000 or so.&lt;p&gt;How many websites have user-definable menu shortcuts, unlimited undo, instant user-feedback for every operation, tooltips that can be switched on or off, full internal drag &amp;amp; drop and OS-level drag and drop of files, standard user interface elements that work how the user expects them to work, a context-sensitive online help system, reconfigurable toolbars with user-definable icon sets, multiple open documents at once, movable and reconfigurable tool windows, manye internationalizations, and so on?&lt;p&gt;The web is still the future, I know, but web application UX designers are still re-inventing the wheel and without some enforced UI guidelines like Apple had in the 90s websites will never fully catch up with desktop apps in terms of usability.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, a comparison with modern desktop apps is much more favorable, because most of them have regressed in terms of usability.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>While I don&amp;#x27;t entirely disagree, how many web sites &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; the kind of features you&amp;#x27;re talking about? Have you ever looked at Hacker News and thought &amp;quot;if only this had user-definable menu shortcuts,&amp;quot; or been shopping on Amazon and thought &amp;quot;this would be so much better if it had toolbars with custom icons&amp;quot;? Probably not.&lt;p&gt;One of the most frustrating things about modern web development, at least to cranky old people like me, is the conflation of web sites with &lt;i&gt;web applications.&lt;/i&gt; If the use case you&amp;#x27;re talking about is truly trying to replace what would otherwise be a desktop application, like Gmail or (heaven help us) a code editor or word processor, then many of the features you&amp;#x27;re talking about start becoming useful. But for so, so many &lt;i&gt;web sites,&lt;/i&gt; the focus on feature-rich client side toolkits has become, well, kind of a distraction. Is there any real advantage &lt;i&gt;to the user&lt;/i&gt; if the New York Times web site is a state-of-the-art React application? Is it improving my reading experience? I not only don&amp;#x27;t need them to be using a toolkit that gives them desktop-class drag and drop capability, I don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; it, because I&amp;#x27;m just there to &lt;i&gt;read a damn article.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So when you write &amp;quot;web application UX designers are still re-inventing the wheel and without some enforced UI guidelines like Apple had in the 90s websites will never fully catch up with desktop apps in terms of usability,&amp;quot; my reaction can&amp;#x27;t help but be: you literally just used &amp;quot;web application&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;website&amp;quot; as if they were interchangeable, and they are not. There&amp;#x27;s a worthwhile discussion to be had over how much &amp;quot;desktop-class UX&amp;quot; we actually need for our web applications, but I&amp;#x27;d like to see our web &lt;i&gt;sites&lt;/i&gt; stop being built like they were web &lt;i&gt;applications&lt;/i&gt; when they don&amp;#x27;t need to be.</text></comment>
<story><title>Simple Does Not Mean Ugly</title><url>https://uglyduck.ca/simple-does-not-mean-ugly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonathanstrange</author><text>To be honest, I have never encountered a website so far that even remotely had the same level of usability of a really good desktop application around the year 2000 or so.&lt;p&gt;How many websites have user-definable menu shortcuts, unlimited undo, instant user-feedback for every operation, tooltips that can be switched on or off, full internal drag &amp;amp; drop and OS-level drag and drop of files, standard user interface elements that work how the user expects them to work, a context-sensitive online help system, reconfigurable toolbars with user-definable icon sets, multiple open documents at once, movable and reconfigurable tool windows, manye internationalizations, and so on?&lt;p&gt;The web is still the future, I know, but web application UX designers are still re-inventing the wheel and without some enforced UI guidelines like Apple had in the 90s websites will never fully catch up with desktop apps in terms of usability.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, a comparison with modern desktop apps is much more favorable, because most of them have regressed in terms of usability.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smt88</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;How many websites have...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Honestly I&amp;#x27;d settle for buttons that are obviously buttons and menus that aren&amp;#x27;t hidden by default.&lt;p&gt;A lot of web design has gone backwards in usability, especially since Google popularized Material design.</text></comment>