I intend for this blog to have roughly two types of posts: rather long ones in which I really detail design principles through some particular example; and shorter ones where I just briefly describe a particular feature that works well or poorly. One of my friends, upon seeing my new blog, told me, "I'm not going to lie to you, Ari, this is the longest blog post ever written." So today I think I'll do one of those shorter (or at least, more digestible) types of posts.
Happy Fourth of July, folks! In honor of our country's economic situation, today's topic is about the failure of the wealth-creating industry. Specifically, their failure to make good websites.
I'm talking specifically about the Forbes slide show feature (example). Forbes, like many other journalism sites, is in love with slide shows. But they've managed to create just about the worst slide show feature I've ever seen on an allegedly non-amateur website. Rather than forming a narrative about this, I'm just going to list all of the problems with it that I can think of in bullet-point form:
· Slide shows are an unnecessary feature in the first place. Unless you're only displaying a series of pictures with minimal accompanying text that forms some sort of sequential narrative, the format has no purpose. What Forbes displays as slide shows are all essentially text lists accompanied by illustrations. A single page should suffice for these, or at least a format where 5-10 frames are placed on each page.
· Because slides have to be viewed in sequence, they introduce an unnecessary burden on the user. Random-access slide shows are an exception, but neither Forbes nor many other sites do this.
· The Forbes slide show automatically forwards to the next frame. The only other slide show I can think of that does this is PowerPoint, and that's only if you explicitly tell it to.
· Not only does the slide show automatically forward, but the time it stays on each frame is around ten seconds, often not enough to read the text even for fast readers.
· The show allows you to stop it, but as soon as you manually forward to the next slide, the automatic feature resumes. Failure to remember when a user changes a setting is a big problem.
· There are manual controls for going forward and back, but, as noted, they do not override the automatic feature.
· Furthermore, on the first slide, only the 'next' button is displayed, and it looks exactly like the 'play' button on most music players. Along with the 'stop' button, these look like 'stop' and 'play' buttons. Typically when a computer feature has manual forward/backward buttons, the arrows are either double-headed, tailed, angled, or otherwise differentiated from the common isosceles triangle of the 'play' button.
· Yes, there is a speed adjustment control, but it's pointless. Why not simply allow the user to manully forward when they are done with a slide? Unless all of the slides take almost exactly the same amount of time to read, you will either miss content or be waiting for a while for the next one to load.
· When the next slide is loaded, an entire new page loads. This is a perfect example of when AJAX should be used to allow the next frame to display without reloading the entire page. Part of the purpose of a slide show is to be able to move through it quickly when you're done with a slide. The load time should and could be a tenth of a second or less. (Many web slide shows use Flash. I think this is an extraneous use of the plugin, but it works as long as it is not so graphics-heavy that it impedes rapidly moving to the next slide.)
· Consistent with the slide show's general principle of unnecessarily taking control from the user, the middle button-click does not work on the manual forward/backward links. The middle-button click should open a link in a new tab or window, but Forbes has unnecessarily used Javascript to implement the links instead of hard-coding them into the HTML. (The Javascript link implementation could still be set up to work with middle-clicks, but almost no developers bother with this, and Forbes is no exception.) What you end up getting is the button being clicked as normal, plus a new window or tab opening with a Javascript command as a URL, that the browser doesn't know what to do with. Google Chrome, however, brilliantly designed their browser to handle such links, although there are some cases where it doesn't work.
· The slide show starts automatically. When you open it up, you had better be ready to read it. This is not good news for users such as myself, who open up many links and often don't start reading them right away. This also largely prevents you from sending someone a link to an individual slide.
The bottom line is this is a poor implementation of an antiquated feature that should not be used on the type of content it is displaying. Plain ol' HTML displaying several elements at once and allowing you to navigate at your will would be far superior. If they want to keep the slideshow, it should be implemented with AJAX or Flash so that you do not have to load a new page for each frame. And it should be embedded or included in the articles that link to it, rather than standing alone as it does now.
The only reason I can think of for Forbes to have this format of slideshow is to increase their ad revenue by forcing the user to load many pages to view a small amount of content. This isn't a particularly smart idea, because it's just as likely to annoy users (such as myself) who, after having viewed unnecessarily many pages, will just decide not to return to the site.
Blog posting will be scant for the next several days as I move from Austin, Texas to Washington, DC.
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Glad you commented on this; I've been chafing at Forbes's slide shows for the two years or so they've been around. I agree with your assessment. The slideshows are clunky and unfriendly, but Forbes uses them for enough good content that I end up viewing them several times a month.
ReplyDeleteWebsite designers seem to me much akin to chair designers. Whenever I encounter a horribly uncomfortable chair -- and that's often -- I always think that whoever designed the chair (a) didn't bother to have a range of people test it for comfort, and (b) must have designed it for their own ass, which must be quite a sight.
I think the same thing about clunky websites. Many web designers seem to have pleased their own (poorly educated) eye, and never troubled to invite a variety of people to test-drive it, while observing their reactions and noting the points of friction. I think that often the designer just grabbed the easiest-to-grab hunk of code that more or less performs the function they want, with little or no thought about how usable it is.
Websites are much more complex than chairs, so there are correspondingly more things that can be wrong with them. A bad website can be more uncomfortable than a bad chair.
Interesting points. I think a large part of the reason there are so many bad chairs (like other products) is because those drive up the need for really, really expensive chairs that the company makes their real money on.
ReplyDeleteThe same probably doesn't apply for websites. I think the biggest problem there is that many, many developers are not actually using the features they're being paid to create. So they get neither the richness of feedback or the motivation to make it work well.
I suppose the Forbes slideshows appear on multiple sites; I see them on MSNBC.com. MSNBC also uses a different but similar slideshow format in their Health section for material from Prevention Magazine. For example, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31573061/ .
ReplyDeletePrevention's slideshow format is less obnoxious than Forbes's in that it has no automated frame advance, just manual forward and back buttons. But Prevention's slideshows, like Forbes's, also reload the entire page with each forward or back. And, like Forbes's, they're simply unnecessary. The material would be easier to read if it was in MSNBC's standard page layout: contiguous text broken into manageable-sized pages. (And in a larger font. The text in those slideshows is pretty small.) Actually, the Prevention slideshows do offer contiguous text. Click "Print this," just below the lower-right corner of the slideshow frame, and a window opens with all the slides together on one page for printing.
I buy your theory that a major reason for these unfriendly slideshows is to push more ads into readers' faces. The last I knew, advertisers pay per page view, so more views = more revenue. Higher page-view numbers also make a site more attractive to advertisers.
There's probably no easy equivalence between a reader viewing 12 slides via 12 page loads, vs. 12 slides viewed within a single page load. More motivation to stay with the more primitive viewing method.
I also think the slideshows hold a "modern, slick, and cool" factor for site builders who aren't educated in design and usability, or don't keep up with the cutting edge of their craft.
In fairness to web designers whose sites don't yet use AJAX, how long has it been available? I first saw it fairly recently, 4-5 months ago I think.
Paying for ads per page view is increasingly obsolete, although many advertising services still offer it. These features may have just been designed under the false belief that the number of page views matters -- or they may be relics of a time when they did. Nowadays most ad revenue is based on clickthroughs.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly do you mean by AJAX? The basic technology has been available for at least 10 years, and I've seen it in widespread use for 4-5. And I shouldn't have said AJAX in my post at all -- slideshows could easily be implemented by preloading the entire content and only displaying one portion of it at a time. As I mentioned in the HuffPost post, there's no need to do any asynchronous loading unless the content is very large or will have changed since the page itself was loaded.