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Old 06-11-2010, 04:39 PM   #1
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Ooh, pretty buttons!

I launched up TF2 today and got a face full of awful, PC-crashing menu layout. I had read the details of the 10 June 2010 patch beforehand and was open minded toward the changes, but they ended up being everything I hate in a UI these days - lots of buttons, "intuitive" navigation, text limited and graphics heavy. Why, if I didn't know better, I'd say TF2 was being retooled to appeal to Mac users!

This is just the latest menu change in recent months, preceded by Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and in the early 2000's Yahoo!. My question is - what's up with this?

Do people really find this messy, chaotic, "only I know my office" type atmosphere attractive? WHY? If they're haphazard IRL I can imagine feeling comfortable in a cluttered environment online, but basic functionality is what made many of these sites popular in the first place. And, dare I say it, the layout changes might be the cause of their decline.

Yahoo! once looked like Google, before it tried to cram ads and worthless information into every pixel on its main page. I stopped using Yahoo! because of that, and now Yahoo! can't go back to a basic layout because it needs those ads to survive. It's kind of like a drug addiction and developing a physiological dependence on the drug.

MySpace, so legend holds, also had a "basic" simple format long ago. From my own personal experience, Facebook did as well. I never used MS but stopped using Facebook when all the microblogging, games and quizzes started appearing and information privatized. I connected with three of my friends through 2007 Facebook by doing an interest search, PM-ing them and setting a time to hook-up, something impossible with 2010 Facebook. In fact, 2010 Facebook fairly useless for "networking" online because so many people set their status to private. The functionality decreased.

YT is much the same, the page I visit most often is my own user page, because looking for other videos, authors and comments is such a hassle now. I just let them come to me, it's much easier.

Background aside, debate question is "Do you think messy UI's appeal to the masses? If so, why is there a decline of traffic toward those sites after the change? If not, how do you explain the popularity of web owners switching to a messy UI?"
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Old 06-11-2010, 06:02 PM   #2
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I blame Mac users.
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Old 06-11-2010, 06:21 PM   #3
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People are dumbing down technology because people are getting dumber. Why do you need to read when there are pretty buttons.
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Old 06-11-2010, 09:20 PM   #4
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I guess that explains why forums haven't really changed in layout for the past 10 years. At some point, you have to read something.
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Old 06-11-2010, 11:02 PM   #5
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Well as you know, they call it the great Web 2.0!!!
More user-friendly, pretty and simple, for the average user as well as creating a webpage and feel that is pleasing to the eye.

Gotta use the weak-minded and easily pleased for your own agenda sometimes.
Staggering statistic: # of intelligent humans < # of jello molds twittering about going to Wendy's and coming home to find that their house were robbed because someone saw their tweet.

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Old 07-24-2011, 10:52 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
debate question is "Do you think messy UI's appeal to the masses? If so, why is there a decline of traffic toward those sites after the change? If not, how do you explain the popularity of web owners switching to a messy UI?"
When it comes to website user interfaces, I think most people want swiss-army knife-like functionality with a spork-like appearance. In other words, I want it to look simple but be able to do whatever I want it to do.

The number of computer projects which start off with the ambitious "does it all" end goal are few. The only one coming to mind right now is VLC Media Player, quite frankly. Most computer projects seem to start off in the middle, and the rest start off at the opposite end of the spectrum: they exude minimalism.
  • OSes like Linux used to brag about how they only would install onto your hard drive the bare minimum code needed to do shit and they'd let you the user have full control to then add in whatever else you may need or want, e.g. video codecs? I'm talking Debian here, not Ubuntu. Real Bear Grylls kind of stuff. "Survivalist operating system," that is. "Roughing the rugged wilderness with the bare minimum in tools and equipment."
  • Many web browsers' main selling point has been their (claim to) minimalist execution. This was what catapulted Firefox into the fray back in 2004 (first as Firebird, then as Firefox), quickly resulting in it outnumbering Opera in terms of users and before long (2006-ish?) posing a serious market share challenge to IE. As the Firefox project grew, Opera rebranded itself (circa '07? I forget) and tried to attract people to its minimalism versus the now-bloated Firefox 3.0. And then of course most recently you have Google's Chrome browser. And what's the name of its game? You guessed it: minimalism.
  • Speaking of Google, you already touched on this in your opening post, but Google's whole original platform was (1) ridiculously minimalist user interface and (2) a search engine that simply worked, returning the results people most wanted or benefited from with the most intuitive and short keyword searches. In other words, it wasn't even the look of the page: even how Google's engine operated was minimalist in its design. It pretty much killed off the Lycos, Yahoo, AOL, etc search mentality of typing in "How do I get to Chicago from Dallas?" as opposed to "chicago dallas directions".
And now we come to social networking sites like Facebook and, most recently, Google+. Last summer when you posted this thread, you were bemoaning the fact that Facebook keeps cluttering up its UI with each subsequent upgrade. That continues to happen, as we've seen, and your question to us is why does it happen if the majority is against it ... or is it that the majority aren't against it? You seemed confident they were against it but confused by the examples from history staring you in the face of companies doing the opposite of what you believed most people to want. Well, my answer to your question from last summer would be that I do think most people want a minimal interface but I also believe that it's more specific than that. People don't just want minimalism: they want functional minimalism, i.e. they want everything that they want accessible to be accessible and nothing else. But as you know, each individual has a different idea of what is and what isn't necessary. So for instance, one social networker may believe that a way to communicate (e.g. PMs or wall posts), account names, and account pictures are enough. Like a minimalist dating website. Another person may want the inclusion of a field for things like telephone number and address. Another may want a section for hobbies. And it keeps going like that. What I think happens is, most of the features you've seen added to Facebook are features that their internal studies reveal a majority of people would like to see added -- but the catch is, no one person is in every majority every time. So like, I may be a Yes vote in a study for "Do you want to see photo albums on Facebook?" and you might be a No, but turn it around and I might be a No for "Do you want it to show the courses you took in college?" and you might be a Yes. (Just say.) And so neither one of us is pleased with the final Facebook result because we both perceive it as having become more bogged down with useless junk -- it's just that we two individuals disagree on which new additions are the junk and which ones aren't. I think that's how it goes for all the Facebook upgrades. Or, really, for all the upgrades period to the things I listed above. So long as the democratic majority seems to want it in surveys conducted by the R&D department, the company will implement the new feature. But as time goes on, every spork winds up becoming a swiss-army knife and nobody ends up happy because we all want custom swiss-army knives that are missing various features. (I want the one without the capped bottle opener and the scissors while you want the one without the corkscrew and the nail file, to use the example.) And so I'll say this:

(1) The arrival of something like Google+ is inevitable because it's a return to minimalist form that most people naturally desire. For the same reason many people abandoned IE for Firefox, many abandoned Firefox for Chrome. (I haven't. Pretty happy with a lot of the add-ons I have for Firefox. But I'm not everyone. ;p) And arguably for the same reason people first loved Facebook, I think they're going to love Google+. (I actually haven't bothered with this one either! lol)

(2) One thing which could really help Google+ out, and which we might see Facebook having to implement pronto, is Google's affinity for modules. Everything is modular with Google. You can check a box and things will appear or vanish from your Gmail Inbox default viewscreen. You can similarly check boxes and things will appear or vanish from your iGoogle homepage. Google's modular approach to innovation allows people to easily customize their Google+ pages into looking how they want them to look. They can make Google+ the swiss-army knife they want it to be: 100% minimalist w/o any loss of core functionality as they perceive it. To me their page might be bulky, to you it might be sparse, but to them it's just right. And I think that's probably where UI design is headed these next few years: finding ways to allow people to see websites as they want to see them rather than having one-size-fits-all homepages or application GUIs. A return to Debian Linux, if you will, except with all the headaches and hassles of, well, a bare minimum, self-installed, self-implemented Linux distro.
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Old 07-24-2011, 11:45 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
(2) One thing which could really help Google+ out, and which we might see Facebook having to implement pronto, is Google's affinity for modules. Everything is modular with Google. You can check a box and things will appear or vanish from your Gmail Inbox default viewscreen. You can similarly check boxes and things will appear or vanish from your iGoogle homepage. Google's modular approach to innovation allows people to easily customize their Google+ pages into looking how they want them to look. They can make Google+ the swiss-army knife they want it to be: 100% minimalist w/o any loss of core functionality as they perceive it. To me their page might be bulky, to you it might be sparse, but to them it's just right. And I think that's probably where UI design is headed these next few years: finding ways to allow people to see websites as they want to see them rather than having one-size-fits-all homepages or application GUIs. A return to Debian Linux, if you will, except with all the headaches and hassles of, well, a bare minimum, self-installed, self-implemented Linux distro.
As I was reading your post I kept asking myself why corporations never did this before. But there was one company that did - Cerulean Studios, who developed Trillian. One could install what protocols to be supported and how deeply to customize them, so it became a personalized swiss army knife.

What never ceases to enrage me, though, are mandatory changes implemented by management or R&D or whoever that reduce this. Trillian forced a mandatory upgrade to Trillian Pro last month, and in trying to remove Trillian Pro I lost all of my logs from November 2010+. I still can't get rid of it, and Cerulean seems to think it's an "upgrade" and bonus for users who were still using Trillian 3.

I wonder? Trillian 3 Pro never really sold well, because it added a bunch more communication features that people never really needed. Like video conferencing support, a calendar, options for different text, etc. Cosmetic or niche stuff that adds extra clutter to the protocol (most lamentably, I could simply right click to access another person's logs, but now I have to navigate three-four menus to access it using Pro).

I don't completely buy your argument that companies try to cater to majorities and end up offering everything to try and appease every niche when looking at the YouTube example - here we have a bunch of people who hated the changes and still hate the changes (I haven't used my YouTube account in months ever since it required a Google Account link, and one can't register a new Google Account without cell phone confirmation) who were never given the option to simply hold onto the old system. Google tried to force it on them, and while it's probably been a positive effect overall, Google has failed to capture all of the market that it so seeks with YouTube.

On Arlong Park, I explained that YouTube isn't profitable, and never has been. Unlike Gmail, Google can't properly target ads to cater to individual user tastes. There's no simply search algorithm, especially for weird stuff, like guys who watch Sharon Stone videos and movies of horses mating.

Even 4chan is breaking even, despite its massive traffic. Porn sites make tons of cash off users who connect from the adult boards, and regrettably certain Japanese media companies have made money off of the "Japanese Culture" consumers. But as diverse as 4chan's demographic is, it's still pretty homogenous compared with the very mainstream YouTube. Even with legit advertising, Google has very poor aim.

So, inherency - it's obvious to you and me that allowing users customization is the ultimate way to appease them. Thankfully they're doing it now. Let consumers limit their preferences and make it simpler to target their specific tastes! Yet why did Google go and be arses and do all of this inconvenient, security compromising bull-crack that drove people like me away beforehand? Envy, or something?
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Old 07-25-2011, 12:12 AM   #8
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I'm a bit too sleepy at the moment to respond to all of your salient points in kind, so I'll just focus on the one I think I'm most clear-headed about right now and that's your point about Youtube not being profitable.

I am not sure how true or false this is. I just don't know. You challenge it and I say, "Okay, I could believe it, but I don't." My gut instinct is that Youtube is profitable for Google by simple virtue of two facts: (1) the traffic (ooooooooh, the traffic!) and (2) the ad revenue that comes with it. You're saying that it's misdirected. That's true. But that's also true of television advertisements. People who pay to have their ads put on TV make a best guess about which window they think their target market segment is going to be watching TV in and they pay to have their ad run at that time. So for example, my complaint from a few months back about how I was watching CNN at a McDonald's and they kept having these annoying ads for senior citizens. Even though that ad is misdirected towards me, it doesn't change the fact that the broadcaster was paid in full by the advertised company. If, for example, it's a commercial about me selling some scammer all my gold for $$$ and I say "NO! ", the scammer loses out, not CNN. CNN's still made their money. The scammer had to pay them to have his ad put on TV in the first place. What happens after that is the scammer's business. I think the same thing holds true with Youtube: it's just like the television model where Youtube (the "broadcast network") tells the companies who want ad space, "Look, bub, if you want ad space on this particular video, it's gonna cost ya." Company asks how much. Youtube tells them. Company agrees to pay it. Ad goes up. Whether I see the ad or not (and I don't -- HOORAY, FIREFOX PLUG-INS) isn't Youtube's immediate problem, it's the company's immediate problem. It's only an indirect (or non-immediate) problem for Youtube that will only become a serious problem for them if/when the people buying ad space on Youtube start saying, "You know what? Screw your price demands. They're unreasonably high. We all know that you're wrong about the claim that x many people are gonna see this ad. It's more like x/50 because of ad-blocking plug-ins. So we're only going to pay you one-fiftieth of what you asked. And if you tell us to kiss your ass, then we will. We're not paying you what you asked, Youtube." Only then will Youtube really be in a bind. But it's been 3+ years since the ad-blocking software for Firefox and other web browsers has waged thorough war with Youtube, the ad-blockers are handily winning the war, and yet Youtube seems to me to still be doing fine.

So I mean ... if you could show me proof, like Google's IRS info for Youtube or like Google publically announcing that Youtube is a huge financial black hole for them or something to that effect, then I'd be inclined to believe what you said about Youtube not being profitable for them. But the way I see it, I think Youtube is as profitable for Google as all the non-cable TV networks are for their respective parent companies.

*sleepy* Apologies if this post is incoherent.
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Old 07-25-2011, 01:30 AM   #9
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This post hits some of your points, and links to articles detailing YouTube's financial situation. YouTube consumes a ton of bandwidth because of its ridiculous traffic - that cost alone might be the reason any gains from the paid partnership program + paid advertising doesn't cover things. But considering how popular 4chan is, and that it's breaking even while YT isn't, Google's either doing something wrong in the ad business or YT is a failed business model. All the traffic in the world is useless if one can't make money off of it.


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It's only an indirect (or non-immediate) problem for Youtube that will only become a serious problem for them if/when the people buying ad space on Youtube start saying, "You know what? Screw your price demands. They're unreasonably high. We all know that you're wrong about the claim that x many people are gonna see this ad. It's more like x/50 because of ad-blocking plug-ins. So we're only going to pay you one-fiftieth of what you asked. And if you tell us to kiss your ass, then we will. We're not paying you what you asked, Youtube." Only then will Youtube really be in a bind. But it's been 3+ years since the ad-blocking software for Firefox and other web browsers has waged thorough war with Youtube, the ad-blockers are handily winning the war, and yet Youtube seems to me to still be doing fine.
Are ad-blockers really winning? I can block Google ads, but those ads that appear before videos load don't go away. And I expect to see more flash-based advertisements in the future.

How advertisment busts become a problem - YouTube doesn't charge the same price for advertising space. It's just like basic cable, where prime-time television is going to have different commercials than during day-time TV. If we have the same commercials, the corporation that paid for them likely paid more for the prime-time slot. Since there's limited supply for the super high traffic videos and channels, YouTube gets a lot of cash from whoever bids the highest on the video.

If the company is going to be putting out a lot of cash, it expects its ad is going to reach the proper demographic. Media research, reinforced by economic success, have shown demographics to be the most effective way to market products - YouTube simply doesn't nicely group people into demographics. Even the same product will have different approaches to its marketing depending on the time of day and expected demographic it's catering to -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6WMnFsGgK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKaIu3-YtAw

If YouTube can't gurantee a solid demographic, there's going to be less interest in its advertising space, so less revenue for Google. I can't comment on the ad-blocking population, but I know a lot of mainstreamers don't have ad-blocking tech, and advertisers across the internet are betting that they never will.
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Old 07-25-2011, 09:58 AM   #10
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This post hits some of your points, and links to articles detailing YouTube's financial situation.
When the CEO of Youtube admits in 2010 that the company has yet to turn a profit, I guess that's all the evidence I'd need. An embarrassing confession for the company to make, to be sure, one not made lightly nor in jest. But leading into your next comment ...
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Are ad-blockers really winning? I can block Google ads, but those ads that appear before videos load don't go away.
Absolutely ad-blockers are winning. I have never, never seen one single advertisement on Youtube on my personal computer. Never. Not even once. I was shocked the first time I saw ads on the side of Youtube videos from a school computer lab. I was even more shocked when I saw that Youtube videos now had pre-video ads when trying to show my sister stuff via her laptop when we were both at home. For me to have been living in a bubble like that, I would call that very efficient work on the part of the ad-block programmers to stay one step ahead of Google (or to very, very quickly outmaneuver Google's latest maneuvers against ad-blocking, so quickly that I never even get a chance to see those maneuvers of Google's in the first place). But I noticed a comment in that article you linked:
Quote:
I must be missing something here. How can Ad blocker stop youtube from forcing you to view its ad videos when you can't watch the video you are going to when you have to watch those before the video you want shows up? I have Adblock and you still get forced into watching those videos.
Yeah, he's definitely missing something, and so are any of you if what he's said is happening to you too. I've never been forced to watch an ad before a video loads on Youtube. I've never been forced to see ads on the sidebar either nor ads that pop up 10 seconds into the video, but it's the pre-video ads that he's saying are bogging him down so I'll focus on those. A lot of streaming video outlets -- Youtube, Crunchyroll, Hulu, to name a few -- have an advertisement that'll show up at the beginning that you have to sit through and then may have additional ads that pop up at designated "commercial break" points. I don't ever see those nor does the video pause or go black for the 20-30 seconds those ads would normally take. If I'm watching a video on Youtube, say of Robot Chicken's on the Robot Chicken official channel, the video will load immediately. No ads, no delay. If I'm watching one on Crunchyroll, likewise, no ads, nearly seamless transition between pre- and post-commercial break video segments. I have only two anti-ad, anti-pop up, anti-script things installed in my Firefox so if you have one of these two and it isn't doing the job, then maybe you want the other:
(1) Adblock Plus (current version: 1.3.9)
(2) NoScript (current version: 2.1.2.4rc3)
Of the two, Adblock Plus is like attacking an intruder with a club while NoScript is like tazing them, then incapacitating them further, drugging and/or shackling them up, and only allowing the intruder to come out of consciousness when YOU choose to administer the antidote or use the key or whatever. Also of the two, Adblock Plus is a lot more famous so I'm going to assume that if you're still having problems with ads on Youtube, it's because you need #2, not #1. The rest of this reply runs off of that assumption.

A lot of people do not initially like NoScript because it very noticeably changes your web browsing experience but you get used to it and I honestly think it's for the better and would give the NoScript staff two thumbs up for their diligence and integrity. I keep hearing people saying "Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus!" and then there are a few souls who are saying, like Doppel or like the guy I quoted, that they're still being forced to watch ads on Youtube. If that's the case, I'd suggest investigating NoScript. Like I said, though: you have to be warned that 21st-century websurfing is such a script-driven experience that many websites will appear "broken" on first pass with NoScript installed. NoScript is like the über bodyguard: it lets NO scripts through that you haven't told it to let through. So ... let me show you an example with a very script heavy site, Kotaku:

Sample Part 1
Sample Part 2

As you can see, there are many scripts which your web browser (be it Firefox, IE, whatever) ordinarily allows through because otherwise the website experience can be broken. But if you choose for it to be (temporarily) broken, then you've outmaneuvered the ad companies: because they were counting on you allowing them through in the first place.

It should be pointed out that NoScript's main purpose is another reason you might want to consider getting it: preventing your computer from being infected or hijacked by malicious code embedded in innocent-looking containers -- like advertisements -- that are ordinarily given the green light by your browser because it doesn't know any better.
Quote:
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If YouTube can't gurantee a solid demographic, there's going to be less interest in its advertising space, so less revenue for Google.
Probably. But I think that we're going to be fast approaching the point where, courtesy of tags for videos, they'll be able to do directed advertising. [long explanation deleted], but long story short, if other users become free to tag our videos and not just us, it stands to follow that in the long run the content of your videos will be correctly tagged whether you want it to be or not (e.g. you uploaded a play-thru of Pokemon Black, chose not to say the word "Pokemon", but someone else put it in for you against your will) and that, by making use of these tags, Google will be able to direct advertisements towards their most appropriate targets (e.g. putting video game ads with a video game Youtube video). I think people will be able to upvote tags, much as they currently can upvote comments, and Google will heavily rely upon the userbase correctly tagging and upvoting the correct tags for videos. So even if a video has the tags "Pokemon | poop | windshield wiper | barracuda," if only Pokemon has 1000 upvotes and the other three each only have five or so malicious votes, the ad that's going to show up on the page is going to be a video game or other Pokemon-relevant ad.
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