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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @07:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the which-witch-is-which? dept.

Is it because websites are converging on what boosts search rank? Or maybe there is a consolidation in the frameworks used to build web sites? Perhaps users gravitate to using sites whose layouts are "familiar"?

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar:

Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: "Why are all websites starting to look the same?"

These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.

My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.

We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

[...] This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry—one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:24PM (7 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:24PM (#994229) Homepage Journal

    Responsive design? Isn't that what HTML did all by itself when it was first invented unless you messed with it?

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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:05PM (6 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:05PM (#994284)

    No, HTML had no design when it was first invented. Which is why it's so painful to read the Hacker's Dictionary [dourish.com] on a widescreen monitor.

    "Responsive" design is just what happened after people had spent 10 years trying to design pages to properly use the space on a typical computer monitor, and then the same web site had to work on that and a tiny handheld screen. Which, incidentally, is great for reading the Hacker's Dictionary, as long as the tiny handheld screen guesses a reasonable font size.

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    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:14PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:14PM (#994309)

      No, HTML had no design when it was first invented. Which is why it's so painful to read the Hacker's Dictionary [dourish.com] on a widescreen monitor.

      Use one of those modern window managers that let you resize your browser. I'd rather have a wall of text that I can make more narrow then to have a styled site that uses a hardcoded max of 800 pixels (or whatever) of the available space for content.

      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday May 14 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday May 14 2020, @06:04PM (#994325) Homepage

        [CTRL] + scrollwheel is also a pretty quick workaround.

      • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday May 18 2020, @04:07PM

        by meustrus (4961) on Monday May 18 2020, @04:07PM (#995891)

        You expect too much of your users. We're trying to sell, dammit. We want all those computer illiterate folks buying stuff on our web site, so we have to make the experience easy for them and their shitty computers. Who cares about the nerds that can resize windows? They'll figure out a workaround for themselves anyway.</sarcasm>

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        If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @02:27AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @02:27AM (#994488)

      What? tHD reads just fine on a widescreen...