There's a strong economic incentive in business to distinguish oneself from one's competitors by any means necessary because (whisper it) capitalism is a zero-sum game.
Have you ever noticed in science-fiction and other speculative genres, computer systems almost invariably have clean consistent user interfaces. That's what consumers want - relatively simple UIs that work the same for all the content they deal with. that's why things like Bloomberg Terminal are popular, that's why people fall in love with the UIs in videogames.
What retailers and other businesses want is to be different and stand out from their competitors. Since the costs of entry to the web are much lower than those for print (billboards or magazine publication) there is correspondingly more visual clutter. But this isn't a new thing with the web, it's been around as long as there have been magazines. I suffer from severe ADHD; I tend to avoid large racks of magazines in stores because looking at all that imagery and typography at once is very similar to being screamed at by a crowd of people.
This does not mean I hate all graphic design and typography, far from it. But where we went wrong (imho) is that the web became about making every page distinctive instead of concentrating on hypertext and letting people customize it at the client end. Facebook beat MySpace because FB is consistent and graphics are subordinate to the white-and-blue color scheme. Wikipedia succeeds in larger part because it's visually consistent. GeoCities is a graveyard because it wasn't.
The basic problem is that absent other incentives money typically flows towards novelty. But competition alone rarely yields optimal results; rather it tends towards a lower common denominator.
I strongly agree. This is precisely why I love fictional UIs in sci-fi movies and videogames. This is also why I find it natural to use Emacs as my proxy operating system - because there everything is functional and consistent. And it's also why I prefer native UIs to web UIs - because again, there's a deeper system-wide consistency in native UIs.
To your analysis I'd add: companies, because of business pressures, mostly try to milk you instead of helping you. I sometimes call it "extracting value from users" instead of "delivering value to users". The consequence of that is, they want to control as much of the interaction with you as they possibly can. On the web, it means they want to control the rendering phase. As a user, this is precisely what I don't want them to do. I want their data, not their presentation decisions. This conflict is pretty visible where it comes to ad blockers and reader modes, and also one of the big reasons people resort to scrapping websites. In a perfect world where companies cared about delivering value to users, scrapping would not be necessary.
> Facebook beat MySpace because FB is consistent and graphics are subordinate to the white-and-blue color scheme. Wikipedia succeeds in larger part because it's visually consistent. GeoCities is a graveyard because it wasn't.
I'm not a UX person by any margin, but I thought about what you said and I... agree. I wonder if there are any UX studies done on whether customers prefer consistency in UX or not.
Because it looks clean -- and people approving the designs aren't looking at it from a functional perspective. They aren't using the design, they're looking at it statically.
1. The belief that very high contrast black one white contributes to eye strain for some people. I think this one is reasonable - read the literature on how I help dyslexics and this tends to come up. I tend to use a very dark grey instead of black - about 90%
2. A desire to create visual heirarchy without end up with a horrific fruit salad... visual hierarchies are important in text. You can create them by altering font, size, style or colour. Ideally you should be able to create the heirarchy subtly - so the reader understands what is important, but while keeping the site looking clean and sophisticated (see point 3). Changing the greyness of text is one more tool in the box - and where heirarchirs are complex designers can find themselves hunting for tools
3. Minimalist fashion. No one wants their page to look old fashioned. No one wants to establish a visual hierarchy that looks like a Geocities page.
So the temptation is to keep colours muted, to keep style and font changes to the minimum. Using shades of grey to provide almost subliminal cues sounds cool.
I remember reading somewhere that one reason is that low-contrast text looks better in design mockups where people don't typically try and actually read the lorem ipsum. It allows graphic designers to get their design to stand out more when there isn't high-contrast text drawing attention away from the design.
