> "We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog."
How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use and appeal more to their perception of how technology should work!
How dare they! The plebes! DO NOT THEY NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DO?!
Why won't people do more work to preserve the freedom of the web, like setting up their own blogs, and manually maintaining their own contacts?!
That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to:
1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier and more limited than the one before it
2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do that
Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use
systems and have abandoned them for products
that are easier to use
What you're missing here is that those products that are easier to use get replaced like socks, with the users being back on square 1 every single time and struggling to perform even the most basic tasks by clicking their way around.
People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way.
The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore, nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking painful to watch ;)
Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of Everyday Things: http://amzn.to/ryfiuI (the link does contain my affiliate code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that simplicity is a complex topic.
Why won't people do more work ...
setting up their own blogs
Setting up your own blog is just a few clicks away on Google's Blogger, on Wordpress.com, on Tumblr.com or on countless other services. It takes more work to set up a template that represents your style, but that's not something you can do on Facebook anyway.
Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.
"People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way."
This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu, the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with grouping bar in Windows 7.
All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and stick it out with facebook as "the internet".
Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox. Darn it.
Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a system that was never intended to behave like an app.
Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.
We've been using Twitter's Bootstrap in quite a lot of our recent web app projects. It provides a reasonable "standard widget set": http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
Instead of designing your own button, why not use <button> and let the Browser+OS decide how it will lock? Instead of making your own checkboxes (and the behaviour for it) you can just, you know, use the html chekbox. Instead of designing your own form, and "styling" input fields, and then you need to add "behaviour" to the input fields - which will diverge from the browser+os standard, you can just use <input> and <form> tags.
For the rest of the gui widgets like tabs which dont have a html spec, just style it up as close as you can to _look_ like a tab and make it behave like a link - thats enough.
Look at facebook, their UI is a horrible mess, they have introduced thier own "widgets" and changed behaviour for most of the common widgets, like the scrollbar which suddenly jumps back 40% when it reaches the lowest 10 or 20% or so. So the functionality expected - the scrollbar represents a _finite_ document, suddenly it is infinite. Destroy such "ui" crap with the force of a thousand suns.
It may be good for facebook, they can do so since they have 800 million users, and anyone whom they teach _their_ widgets and ui-interactions is further instilled and locked into their usage platform, but as a webdev of projects with less than 1 million people, you cant do that. Stick to the standard. Dont make your users locked into your widget and your conception of what a button or scrollbar is.
The UI "we already know" is there because designers did not listen to your advice, and I thank them for that.
I am also glad, that I don't have to do everything via CLI (which I do like. For some tasks). I am also glad, that I don't have to scroll the content in the window by hunting some scrollbar with my mouse pointer. Hey, I also do like that I don't see scrollbars anymore on my OS.
Yep! What I like about html is how predictable its limitations make it. I can visit a decade old website created by a 14-year old and have the smoothest user experience imaginable. Everything behaves the way you'd expect it.
Javascript is more powerful, but that also means more power to screw up. Sometimes the results are amazing (like Gmail) - but more often than not it just ends up confusing and frustrating, with vital parts of the UI hidden behind a clusterfuck of menus and widgets.
If the systems are hard to use that's our fault. We, the technically oriented geeks, failed to build something for normal humans.
But I don't think that's the case. Grandma has to be taught to use Facebook as well, it's not like it's an intuitive interface, quite the contrary IMO.
It's a problem of not realizing the danger of loosing this wonderful and fragile thing we built.
A lot of you geeks have Facebook accounts, so it's not like it's a service for the technically impaired.
Most people cant handle facebook. They dont even know what they are doing there, its more like a random walk clicking around stuff. Have you ever watched a teenager use a computer? I have, it was not pretty.
We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.