Website Design: Time for Industry Standards?

Am I the only one who notices how much harder it is to get around the Web these days?

I know, I know. I’m an old Geezer pining for the good old days, back in the nineties and the aughts. But bear with me a bit, and see if you agree.

Take simple tabbed browsing. When tabbed browsing started, it seemed the best thing since sliced bread. Everyone soon jumped on board. All apparently recognized the pleasing analogy to taking the binder clip off a long paper document and spreading the pages you want to study—and only those—out on your desk.

So every Website designer let tabs rip or (more probably) took no programming steps to block them. By the mid aughts, tabbed browsing had captured the entire industry.

Nowadays, some internal links in Web pages open in new tabs, but a lot of others don’t. I haven’t taken a quantitative survey. But I do know that blocked (or non-enabled) tabbing is an increasingly prevalent and increasingly annoying phenomenon.

Popups—those things that distract you, block the rest of the page (or the whole screen), and impede immediate comparison with adjacent data—are increasingly replacing tabs. Their rise seems part of the Devil’s plan of advertisers and propagandists: to distract you from whatever you are trying to do at the moment. Popups threaten to make us all scatterbrains.

Then there’s simple page navigation. As everyone who’s done concentrated Web surfing knows, the keyboard is much more efficient than a mouse or trackpad. To use the mouse or trackpad, you have to use your whole arm, not just your fingers. You also have to bring hand-eye coordination to bear, rather than just your “muscle memory” of where the keys are. Using the mouse or trackpad takes up to five times as much time and effort as striking a key, or even a series of two or three keys.

So why do many Web page authors today disable (or fail to enable) the arrow keys, and/or the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys? Why do they literally force you to use the mouse or trackpad to do what you want to do and get where you want to get?

Why can’t you remove the most recent popup and continue what you were doing simply by pressing the Escape key whenever a new popup appears? Why does Google Chrome sometimes leave you no option for navigating a page but searching for its disappearing scroll bar, which appears only when you put the cursor near where it’s supposed to be? IMHO, Chrome’s disappearing scroll bar is the single biggest waste of time and hand-eye coordination ever imposed on innocent Web users.

I think these questions have two answers, one pathetic and one sinister. The pathetic one is that designing and programming Web pages is a tedious business. There’s not much fun or “creativity” in writing Web pages that look and work like everyone else’s, even though doing so would make life much easier for users.

So designers and programmers try to “differentiate” their work by making their pages look different from, and work differently than, others.’ For similar reasons, managers often hire graphic designers and marketers to design Web pages. To judge by the results, these worthies often have little experience in actually using Web pages. As for focus groups and beta testing before “going live,” why bother? Are mere users “artists”? What do they know?

The second reason for this nonsense is more sinister: anticompetitive strategy. If you can design a Website that’s unique in control and function and get enough users to commit to learning it, you can “lock them into” your unique Website. For many users, the “switching costs” of dropping your pages and learning how to use someone else’s will deter their doing so. This is just a special case of “network effects,” increasingly recognized in antitrust and competition law, which give some firms an unfair (non-market) advantage over others.

There is, however, a conundrum. Only the first mover usually gets to enjoy the lock-in effects of switching costs and network effects. This is called the “first mover advantage.”

A prime example is Facebook. It’s original site design, IMHO, was scatterbrained and mostly non-intuitive, especially its original privacy settings. (That’s one small reason, aside from its catastrophic political and social effects, that I deleted my Facebook account forever over three years ago.) Yet because it was the first mover, Facebook managed to capture the lion’s share of social-media traffic and rise to become one of the Big Five.

So why are so many retail sales sites so abysmally non-intuitive and inefficient? Amazon’s is different, but Amazon was the first mover. It has, again IMHO, the most efficient, intuitive and easy-to-use retail site on the Web today.

If I were a retail sales executive wanting to develop a sales Website, I would instruct my staff to copy Amazon’s as closely as possible without infringing Amazon’s copyrights or patents. (Good lawyers and legal assistants don’t cost much more than good programmers.) Then, since almost everyone who uses the Web has bought stuff on Amazon, new customers could use my firm’s Website with little or no learning curve.

Yet that’s not what most retail sites have done. Instead of copying the leader as much as intellectual property (IP) allows, many have gone whole rogue. The result, for most buyers, is like living in a hellish science-fictional Universe where the laws of physics are different on every planet. Welcome to online retailing!

The Websites of the big-box home-improvement retailers Lowe’s and Home Depot are examples. In the abstract, they do have most of Amazon’s features: displays of competing models with photographs and prices, the user’s historical purchase data, and reviews by previous purchasers. But their sites also seem to work differently, and IMHO far less efficiently, than Amazon’s. (Among other things, Lowe’s customer reviews appear in a popup, not a separate tab, making it hard to see other pages simultaneously or to tab separately various star levels of reviews.) Since both developed their online presence late in the game, and at about the same time, there’s not much chance of either gaining a first-mover advantage over the other, or anyone else.

It’s not as if we haven’t seen this sort of thing before. Different gauges of railroad track long hindered the development of a national railroad system. All automobiles must have their brake pedals to the left of their gas pedals. Cars made in Japan and England have to have their steering wheels on the left to be sold publicly here.

Standardization for safety, efficiency and user convenience is as old as industry. So why can’t we have some standardization online?

It needn’t all be mandatory. Some—maybe most—could be recommended only. The recommendations would leave private firms free to decide for themselves whether to adopt the tried and true, or whether to go off on a frolic of their own, knowing that doing so might be more expensive, more time consuming, and possibly harmful to their customers.

At least an industry group could gather once a year and announce a series of “best practices” for such things as tabbed browsing, page navigation, scroll bars, and activation of the arrow keys, page keys and Escape key to avoid excessive use of mouses and trackbars. If the government needs to enact legislation or regulation to cut through the thicket of IP to permit basic standardization of the Web, so be it. Or maybe just a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for Websites would be enough.

The Internet is infinitely more complicated than, for example, railroad track gauges or the placement of automobile controls. But the principle is the same. We humans are creatures of habit. The more we can make things interoperable, the better. The more we can transfer routines that we do regularly from our cerebral cortex to our cerebellum, where action is automatic, the more effective use we can make of our brains. And the safer and easier our lives will be. Nothing in standardization of function should constrain the purely pleasurable or whimsical parts of graphics and video clips that are artists’ rightful domain.

[I expect this post to receive more comments than any other post of mine. I encourage readers to air their specific gripes and opinions, but to avoid possible legal liability for defamation by making clear what’s their opinion and what is fact or their demonstrable experience. The more specific gripes we collect here, the greater the chances of provoking industry action.]

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