Time for fast, minimalist web aesthetic?
Over the past 10 years, web servers have become faster and cheaper. Networks have become much faster. Yet, website performance has mostly stayed the same or gotten worse. We blogged about this on the Scout blog.
If Computers are Faster, Why Are Web Pages Slower?
The culprit is a bloated aesthetic. Weight and complexity of site design have outpaced the increases in network and computer speed.
Now, there is a ton of evidence that users love speedy websites. Fast sites make users click more, stay longer, trust you more, spend more money, and come back more often.
What do we gain from the bloat? At best, we get more visual variety, richer imagery, and more sophisticated interactions. More often, however, we get a surfeit of advertisements, “send to a friend” widgets, and gratuitous Flash effects.
Is the style of design giving us slower sites worth it? Or is a performance-oriented minimalist aesthetic poised for a resurgence?
Safari 5 Leads the Charge
The popularity of Safari 5’s “Reader” feature — which strips content of all its adornments down to stark, mostly imageless text — suggests the time is right. This writeup expresses it well:
Apple’s vision of the web does not include Twitter sidebars, recently popular article links, fancy headers or sharing widgets. In short, Reader cuts through the distractions to the actual content. Of course, that’s exactly what good design should do in the first place — focus your attention on what’s important. If every web page were well-designed, there would be no need for Reader. Clearly, that’s not the case.
Some sites already embrace such an aesthetic, for example, Craigslist, Hacker News, and the Google and Bing home pages.
Advertising is the Loser
The loser in such minimalist design is advertising. Safari Reader notably strips away all advertisements, along with all other images and distractions form the main content. Perhaps a shift to speedier, more streamlined designs will be accompanied by sensible revenue models beyond advertising. For example, micropayments for content sites.
Faster sites, focused designs, fewer advertisements, fair payments for content creators — isn’t that a web aesthetic we could all get behind?
Comments 6 Comments
Widget authors could use DOM insertion techniques so webpage owners would have the option to have the widget wait for page load to render --- but the reality is that 99% of widgets (Google AdWords included) use document.write and with a slowly responding widget, you get a slowly loading webpage.
The other day, my boss and I were about to head to Quiznos to pick up some sandwiches for everyone else in the office. One of my coworkers tried to load the site to look at the menu, but was greeted with a huge mess of Flash. She couldn't easily find what she was looking for. Jokingly I whipped out my Nexus One and headed to their site. I was greeted with an incredibly simple site with a "Menu" link right on the homepage. I was browsing through their menu almost like songs in the music app, moving around with ease. We definitely need to rethink the way we're making sites, because right now most of them really suck.
BTW, love the shot of the new GTI headlights. I just picked one up a few weeks ago and love it :)
http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/06/15/everything-you-wanted-to-know-a...
You might find these numbers interesting, as well.