Why the Drudge Report is Bad Design.
November 19th, 2008Jason at 37Signals recently posted about how the Drudge Report is “one of the best designed sites on the web.” I just couldn’t let this one go.
It’s a load of bollocks, and one in a stream of “hey, let’s take a widely criticized site, call it awesome, and everyone will praise how witty and insightful we are.” It’s as if everyone thinks they can be hailed as geniuses if they rebel against the norm.
Design is not synonymous with utility, and the Drudge Report fails horribly at both.
Good design? Really?
THIS IS WHAT I SEE WHEN I LOAD THE PAGE .
It’s patently absurd to call this good design. from first load, I don’t even know what the page is.
Sites that are successful yet have bad design aren’t necessarily successful BECAUSE of bad design (therefore making it good?), but IN SPITE of. This is the same reason Fox is #1 in viewership despite their utter lack of journalistic integrity, taste, and quality. Fox isn’t #1 because it’s good news, it’s #1 because right-wingers have nowhere else to go. The Drudge Report isn’t popular because of its piss poor design, it’s popular because right-wingers surf it religiously.
The Drudge Report hasn’t changed the design, ever. This could mean that the first design was perfect. It could also mean that Matt Drudge simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t mean that the users love the design… they could be sticking around because no other site has the content they desire.
Let’s move down this point by point
- “There are no tricks, no sections, no deep linking, no special technology required. It’s all right there on one page. “But it’s a mess!” you could say. I’d say “it’s straightforward mess.” I wouldn’t underestimate the merit in that.”
- There ARE sections… if you can suffer to scroll down far enough. Straightforward = good. Mess = bad. Straightforward + mess = good & bad. Straightforward + non-mess = good & good, i.e., better design.
- It’s unique. Certainly. So is every dump I’ve squeezed out of my anus. There’s a REASON the news sites look alike. They WANT to look alike. When you go to CNN .com, without even seeing content, the users say, “oh, this is a news site.” Is it bad to have a news site look like a news site? Saying it’s unique and therefore good is flawed logic – you and i have discussed this before.
- It’s important. Drudge isn’t afraid to be noisy. Sure. That’s an appeal of the Drudge Report, and is totally irrelevant to the design. The argument here is for the philosophy of the site, which 37S claims to be good and extraordinary. Fine. Keep the philosophy. Keep a super noisy headline – the site could have top-notch design, and a screaming headline…(get this)… AT THE SAME TIME .
- It’s cluttered. It’s messy, and there’s no good flow to the information. “Jason” thinks that constitutes… good design? The design doesn’t “encourage wandering,” it just requires effort to plow through. It’s successful because the users feel that the plowing is worth it. Just because it functions now doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. I wonder how many people don’t visit the site for specifically that reason.
- Breaking news. Once again, this is a philosophy of the Drudge Report, and not one of the website design. This could be maintained, regardless of design.
- One guy can run it. That’s a plus. One guy can also make a myspace page, or a geocities home. That doesn’t make good design, and is more a question of web authoring tools. With tools powerful enough, one guy could nearly run any site on the web. The design could be significantly improved, and still have one guy do it.
- No news… once again, Drudge philosophy and concept. Not design. The design is the implementation of the concept, and not having direct info isn’t implementation in this case – it IS the concept.
- Sending people away… see above.
- It’s fast. That’s definitely a plus. I’ll grant that. However, with a little organization, better fonts, and better layout, the design could be improved without sacrificing speed. It’s cheap. See above. It’s one page. See above.
- It makes him a great living – A site’s success can be completely irrelevant to design. See above discussion of Fox.
- All in all, it’s bad design. It may function. It may serve a purpose. However, Drudge’s design limps blindly on like the buffoon in the White House he was so fond of.
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Thoughts on virtual worlds
November 19th, 2008I went to a talk today on virtual worlds and it got me thinking a bit. I’ve always been somewhat of a virtual worlds skeptic. Virtual worlds is one of those things where the concept is so easy to understand that when you’re first exposed to it as a layman, immediately an infinite field of possibility stretches out before you. You end up envisioning something that could have come out of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel where all our transactions would be conducted in a virtual 3D space. The problem is, as soon as you dig a bit below the surface, some real serious usability issues immediately pop up and I’m not convinced that virtual worlds provided a compelling solution.
The power of computer interfaces is precisely that it breaks away from the strict physical constraints of the real world. It is the types of non-physical abstractions that really leverage the full power of using a machine. Imagine if you tried to build Amazon in Second Life, it would be a disaster. The things which make Amazon so powerful is precisely the things which escape from the limitations of real life bookstores. It’s the ability to store millions of books and find books via search rather than navigation and the ability to slice and dice the book collection in all sorts of interesting ways while conventional bookstores are stuck with only a single sort order which make Amazon succeed. Virtual worlds always struck me as an idealistic but naive attempt to add back in the physical constraints that we worked so hard to get rid of.
However, as I was sitting and listening to the talk, it struck me that the real benefit of virtual worlds is to allow for shared virtual experiences. Our current technology really sucks at delivering a shared experience to people who are not in the same physical world as you.
Think of a group of teenage girls who go shopping together at a mall. They might start independently drifting and forming clusters around certain objects. They can gather around a particular item and point out areas of interest and physically manipulate the item. Conversation will be constant and only semi-directed and the entire social experience has a huge amount of depth and richness.
Now think about shopping online. While we do a good job of replicating the commerce aspects but the social experience is hugely impoverished. It basically amounts to sharing links with each other and then verbally describing what you see on the page that should interest them. Sure, you could imagine some fancy, heavyweight collaboration software that does some sort of shared screen and fancy mouse tracking but there is an inherent limitation of how well you can replicate a shared experience on a GUI platform because there’s so little presence information.
The lack of presence in traditional software is part of it’s power. The only way to create something as powerful as Amazon is to abandon the idea of presence. To abandon the concept of shared spaces and canonical representations. But this lack of presence also means that it’s impossible to deliver any meaningful shared experience.
Virtual worlds represent the other compromise. To accept everything that sucks and is limiting about a physical representation and to embrace those constraints rather than fighting against them. The up side of doing this is that you now can allow for the types of powerful shared experiences that we have in the real world.
It’s no coincidence that MMORPGs are the first real success we’ve had with virtual worlds. MMORPGs are founded on having shared experiences and they derive their power from making presence an integral part of the gameplay. However, I think this concept of shared experience allows us to take a much more nuanced view of what the impact of virtual worlds will be. It’ll allow us to gain a more sober insight of what virtual worlds can and cannot deliver which seems much more credible than the utopia that gets hyped in the mainstream press.
A better way of serving ads
November 19th, 2008Here’s a far more non-obnoxious way of doing ads from Ptable.com.
If someone has no adblocker installed, show them the original ad:
If an adblocker is detected, replace the ad with an option for them to donate instead to the site:
If you click the X button, the ad will close and remain closed forever:
Those who click ads aren’t typically donators, and those who block ads would probably prefer to donate so this seems like an effective way of pleasing both parties.
PS: Ironically, I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why none of my images for this post were uploading before realising that any image with “ad” in the name gets blocked by adblock plus. This explains the naming of the images.
“Remember me” sucks at remembering me
November 18th, 2008Why does remember me tend to work so universally poorly? Wordpress for example, is a particularly irritating case, logging me out seemingly at random. Some sites manage to get it right, facebook almost never logs me out. Is there some subtle issue with cookie management that most sites manage to get wrong?
Coupled with this, what’s the basis for remember me only lasting a few weeks? Is this a legitimate security feature? I don’t really see the basis for it. If I check remember me, I want the site to remember me until I am old and grey (or at least until 2038).
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On the auto industry bailout
November 15th, 2008I’ve been reading various things about the audo industry bailout and various opinions of people for and against. Through all this confusion, I thought out I would point out a couple of invariants:
- We’ll still be buying the same number of cars whether GM goes under or not. Those cars will still need parts and workers and those workers will still be working in North American plants. They might not be plants in Michigan but they’ll be somewhere in North America. So when you hear that GM and it’s subsidiaries employ 300,000 people, it does not mean that the employment rate in the US will drop by 300,000 just because GM is out of business.
- The dislocation will be painful. On the flip side of the fence, the market idealists who like to think of creative destruction as an abstract force are wrong. There’s going to be plenty of economic cost before the economy rights itself again. Factories are going to have to be torn down in Michigan and built up in Kansas, assembly lines will have to be retooled from making GM widgets to Honda sprockets, Engineers who are used to working with Mac down the hall now have to work with Joe from Ontario, most of the R&D on the GM Volt isn’t going to be much use for the Toyota Prius.
- Whether you support the bailout or not depends crucially on whether you feel GM can turn itself around. It’s curious that this case rarely seems to be made explicit. Those supporting the bailout make the fundamental assumption that GM can eventually be restored to a smaller yet functional corporation that will eventually return to profitability and those opposing it assume fundamental structural flaws in the company system. I’ve not yet found many articles which make such claims explicit and try to justify yet and yet this is the determining factor in whether the bailout makes economic sense.
Personally, I’m very much against the bailout. It seems to me that the problems that GM face are caused by an endemic failure of corporate culture spanning everything from an uncreative, insular management to obdurate union which is unable to make the concessions needed. Such a thing cannot be fixed through any sort of superficial restructuring or easy infusion of cash. Rather, GM needs to go through the sort of wrenching transition that IBM went through in the 90’s and I don’t see any evidence of such a thing occuring.
Yes, it sucks that GM is going out of business and it’s going to cause enormous economic pain for those involved. It would be great if we could wave a magic wand that would cause that pain to go away and I would wholeheartedly support a bailout plan if that looked realistic. But as it stands, it looks like GM going out of business will be inevitable and all a bailout will do is become an expensive way of forstalling the inevitable.
The 30 day recap and the next 30 days
November 14th, 2008Well, the 30 days are over and it’s been quite an interesting experiment. I’m quite proud that I managed to get a blog post done every single day. One of those posts was inexplicably eaten by the server, one was kind of bullshit and one was done several hours after the deadline. All in all, by my calculations, I think that counts as one $20 donation and one beer that I owe to Jeff.
By an act of total serendipity, I happened upon an ACLU canvasser in my neighbourhood for today so I’m all paid up on that angle:
Doing this 30 day thing was definately interesting to me. I had been battling motivation problems with my blog for a while and it was amazing how such a simple thing managed to get me over the hurdle. As a result, I’m going to be trying another simple experiment.
Over the next 30 days, I’m going to try and develop 10 substantive features for the sites that I’m working on. The parameters of the challenge are the same, $20 to the ACLU for every challenge that I miss. It’ll be a good way to force me to work on some stuff that’s been sitting on the back burner for a while. I’ve yet to figure out how to emulate the social proof aspect although I might end up utilizing my sketches blog for that purpose.
At the same time, the blog is most definately not dead. I’ve got almost a dozen ideas still sitting around that need to be written about so subscribe to the RSS feed to keep yourself updated. The ironic thing seems to be that I’ve posted more content today than any other day now that I’m out of the one post per day format I set myself.
Getting the design right
November 14th, 2008There’s an interesting discussion on reddit right now about the design of a certain computer retailer website in Australia and whether this was a legitimate example of poor design. It’s interesting to me because I actually bought a PCMCIA network card from those guys a long time ago and their customer service was so horrible that I swore never to do business with them again. Yet 4 years later, they’re still clearly in business and seem to have tripled the number of stores they own. So I think it’s an interesting question to ask of whether their website really is as poorly designed as the initial poster assumed it was.
Lets get the preliminary obvious things out of the way: The site has horrible aesthetics, a total disregard for correct color theory and horrendous usability problems (including PDF price lists, ugh). But as someone pointed out in the discussion thread, the stores also have lines going out the door every single day. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when all you have is Dream Weaver, everything looks like a web design problem and just because the site has a web design problem does not mean that it has a design problem.
Lets say you had a journeyman web designer in to do a complete overhaul of the site. Nothing fancy, no high concept flash based monstrosity, just some simple, well laid out minimalistic, tasteful HTML and CSS. Would this be a better design?
Lets say this web designer was also a part time analytics dabbler as well and he knew the importance of not only doing good design but justifying it as well. He manages to prove that user engagement with the site is up, the bounce rate is lower and informal customer surveys indicate they love the new website. Surely this must be a better design right?
Being the paranoid web designer that he is though, he’s prepared yet more information to make his case: He points to how annual revenue increased 60% year on year even after controlling for other sources of growth. Mining the customer records indicates a significant increase of first time purchasers and a larger average orders per customer, all of which can be reasonably conclusively linked to the new word of mouth marketing and better navigation of the new website. Based on a reasonable set of accounting assumptions, the investment on a new website yielded a stunning 50,000% ROI. Satisfied that the designer has convincingly demonstrated the utility of his role, he sits back, utterly unable to comprehend any counter argument to how the previous website could be considered not be considered an example of bad design.
And yes, at this point, I would probably agree with him. If a mythical competent web designer fell into their laps, then there would be no excuse for them to keep the design of their old site. But here’s the thing, I’ve interacted with the owners of this company, they’re a family of stingy Asians (in the totally non-pejorative sense). These are not the types of people who would a) meet and b) appreciate a competent web designer. To imagine the preceding set of events happening, you first have to imagine a completely different type of business which is founded on a completely different business model and would be arguably as successful as the one they have now.
I’m not arguing that the site has good design, just that I’m open to the possibility that it’s not obviously bad design given the context and circumstances.
Simulating a fair coin
November 14th, 2008A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon the question of how thick you would need to make a cylinder for it to be a fair three sided coin. Well, not having the patience to roll a cylinder 1000 times, I whipped up a quick simulation:
Turns out the height needs to be ~1.33 times the radius for there to be an exact equal chance to land on 3 sides.
So now you know.
How not to do information visualisation
November 14th, 2008I was struck when looking at my Google Analytics just how useless this pie chart is:
Nov 12th (day 30): No Evil Geniuses
November 12th, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about the mystery of why spam was so bad at being spam and I claimed that it was a mystery that seemingly defied explanation. None of what I proposed as possible answers was really satisfying. In order to answer this question, I think you have to look further afield and ask some other interesting questions: “Why has there not been a non-pathetic foreign terrorist attempt on US soil since 9/11?” and “Why has there only been a handful of truly crippling computer viruses in the last 10 years”
Our first instinct is that such occurrences are rare because they are difficult. However, neither of these tasks actually are difficult. Two guys in a van managed to terrorize Washington DC for a month and no amount of security precautions could have prevented them from doing so. The Sasser worm was written “by someone that could barely get the code working” and attacked a security flaw that had been noted and patched months ago and other worms haven’t been much more sophisticated. Such things are not trivial but they aren’t of such herculean difficulty that would be sufficient to explain their rarity. Just why exactly isn’t there a legion of evil geniuses who are routinely executing the downfall of society?
An evil genius is anyone who is both a genius and evil where “Evil” encompasses everything from trolling to keying someone’s car to pedophilia, “Genius” is anything which evokes any degree of “huh, why didn’t I think of that?” or “That’s clever”. As a rough approximation, we assume that the number of evil geniuses can be calculated by multiplying the proportion of people who are geniuses with the proportion of people who are evil. But what I’ve noticed through looking at a huge range of diverse social systems is that evil geniuses exist at a stunningly lower frequency than this naive calculation would have us believe. The number of evil geniuses is so off base from the naive calculation that it indicates a our model of the world with regards to evil geniuses is unsalvagable and needs to be replaced, not just tweaked.
Such a claim has radical implications for the design of social systems as so much of our thinking about security, about design and about society is obsessed with preventing evil geniuses from wreaking havoc that we don’t even stop to notice that they aren’t.
Part of the reason we’re so obsessed with evil geniuses is because we think we know what they’re like: they’re just like us except they actually do the evil things we think about. Bruce Schneier, one of the most widely read security experts in the world writes about how
Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”
“Why golly”, the man with the Security Mindset says, “I’ve found a great way to exploit this system. It’s lucky I’m a good person because all that is stopping me from executing this exploit for my personal gain is my innate goodness.”
It’s easy to imagine a person who is just like me except without my innate goodness. As a result, it’s easy to design a system with defenses against such a mythical attacker. What we completely fail to notice is that, most of the time, such an attacker simply does not materialize. But even though evil geniuses might not be a major problem, evil behavior most definitely is and it’s in our best interests to design a system which is resilient to pathological actions such as trolling, flaming and abuse.
Our naive view of the world is that we mentally segment people out into “good people” and “bad people”. Good people are people like us and bad people are people like us, except without any morality. The work of Milgram and Zimbardo shows though that goodness is largely a property of circumstance and the more correct way of thinking about the world is that most people are ordinary people and there are good situations and bad situations. If evil people are inherently evil, then it’s easy to imagine an evil genius. However, if evil is a product of the situation, then maybe the reason there are no evil geniuses was because noone gave them permission to be evil geniuses. The reason why Milgram and and Zimbardo managed to cause people to become evil was by relying on authority to signal that such actions were permissible. Genius, by definition, cannot provide be provided such social proof because you’re doing something new and unexpected. Without such social proof, it’s very hard to create an evil situation and, as a result, evil genius is hard to come by.
Such a statement has radical implications for design: you can cause pathological behavior simply by putting in visible mechanisms to prevent pathological behavior. We look to social cues within the system to understand acceptable bounds of behavior and in certain cases, one could reason that if the designer spent so much time building safeguards against certain behaviors into the system, such behavior must be prevalent and thus, acceptable to experiment with. In some cases, the correct approach to obsessing about the security of a system is to leave the system deliberately unsecured so that it does not even occur to people to test the security.
The “No Evil Geniuses” hypothesis is a radically different way to think about the world and one I don’t even think I can completely justify. At the same time, after having looked at all of these disparate cases in which there simply isn’t any other good explaination, it’s one I’ve been increasingly forced to take. Whenever I’ve gone out on a hunt to spot a rich treasure trove of evil geniuses, I’ve never been able to find them. Maybe there’s a simpler, more coherent explaination for all of this but until I find it, I’m going to bill this the No Evil Geniuses Paradox.
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