Perils of Poor Web Design

Perhaps you've noticed what I've noticed. An increasing number of web sites, both blogs and the more mainstream media, are taking to banner article rotation using Flash. For example, GigaOm, The Economist and (to pick an especially guilty local example) Ottawa Business Journal, and regrettably this is a small subset of the sites with which I am familiar. I dislike this fad in web design. In fact, I absolutely detest it. Let me tell you why.

First, many of these require that you sit there like a stump and wait for the headlines to do their sometimes slow, sometimes fast rotation to see the full set of headline articles. This is a throwback to TV culture that is contrary to the web culture. On the web I want to see what you've got so that I can click on any article that interests me or I can move on to the next site. I suppose I could use an RSS feed for all of these sites, but for my purposes there are too many to make it convenient. As part of my routine each morning, I flip through a number of sites to see what's new -- many news sites are updated with new articles in the early morning -- and I do not want to be forced to sit on my hands while some site demands that I sit on my hands and, at their pleasure, endure their slow reveal.

Second, I often do this navigation on an ancient 5-year old XP machine that bogs down on these Flash-rich sites. This is main reason I installed Ad Blocker on Firefox, to get rid of Flash ads that do this very thing. Now the content is doing the same. At least I can skip video/Flash articles without choking my computer (which I despise in any case since watching them takes too long and the information density is too low) but with the main print articles doing this, it seems I must either endure this torture or find other sites with similar content quality. Even after I've perused the site I must either navigate away or close the tab if I want my computer to perhaps better than a 386sx of a bygone era.

Third, it is a fad and I dislike fads. I dislike them because web sites are only doing this because others are doing it, and they are doing it without regard for their audience. This is similar to an all too common trait of web design in the 1990s -- when the web was still fairly new -- that assaulted us with a wild palette of garish colours, blinking text, and pointless graphics. It's a shame to see that self-indulgent web design is still with us.

As with the writing of prose or the writing of software, the writer makes a choice: to serve the needs of the writer (coder) or to serve the needs of the reader (user). Rotating Flash headlines do not serve me well, and that's why it's bad design. Hopefully this fad will soon pass into history.