<story><title>Why do all websites look the same?</title><url>https://medium.com/s/story/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>actionscripted</author><text>Also:&lt;p&gt;1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.&lt;p&gt;2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.&lt;p&gt;3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.&lt;p&gt;There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop&amp;#x27;s power cord at the top&amp;#x2F;back of the screen.&lt;p&gt;Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That&amp;#x27;s why all websites &amp;quot;look the same&amp;quot; or at least why the author thinks they do.&lt;p&gt;Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn&amp;#x27;t mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>A closer example would be books.&lt;p&gt;For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index &amp;#x2F; contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc.&lt;p&gt;Those features don&amp;#x27;t just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical.&lt;p&gt;But they &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters.&lt;p&gt;Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.&lt;p&gt;Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer &amp;quot;switches&amp;quot;, iOS-style.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why do all websites look the same?</title><url>https://medium.com/s/story/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>actionscripted</author><text>Also:&lt;p&gt;1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.&lt;p&gt;2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.&lt;p&gt;3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.&lt;p&gt;There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop&amp;#x27;s power cord at the top&amp;#x2F;back of the screen.&lt;p&gt;Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That&amp;#x27;s why all websites &amp;quot;look the same&amp;quot; or at least why the author thinks they do.&lt;p&gt;Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn&amp;#x27;t mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>omg_ketchup</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.&lt;p&gt;Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion&amp;#x27;s brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.&lt;p&gt;Flash was &lt;i&gt;so easy&lt;/i&gt; to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why we don&amp;#x27;t see cool shit on the web anymore- it&amp;#x27;s too hard&amp;#x2F;boring to make.</text></comment>