Last year I welcomed the rattling death knell of several of my least favorite design elements and facets of technology.
Some of them have died already, some are dying, and a couple have been
recently diagnosed as “terminal.” Looking forward, I think their
diminishing presence will make 2014 a better year for experience design.
1. The Drop-Down Menu
Drop-down menus have been a cornerstone of user
interfaces
since the dawn of the Internet. Countless sites continue to use hover
state drop-down lists as a critical piece of navigation, but as trends
shift toward fully responsive, device-agnostic design, there won’t
continue to be simple drop-down menus.
In its current form, the
drop-down menu cannot function on platforms where the concept of a
“hover state” doesn’t exist (on tablets and phones). As the “mobile
first” movement continues gaining traction, click-based navigation, such
as the use of a “hamburger button” to nest an entire site’s navigation
in a clickable list, will become more prevalent.
2. Carousel
The
carousel is another ancient relic (by Internet standards, at least) of
web UI that enables pages to feature multiple content elements within a
certain spot above the fold. Typically set to cycle based on time,
carousels have been phased out, particularly on major news sites, in
favor of adaptive content blocks that fill space based on browser width.
Again, the death of this trend benefits
mobile and
tablet
users, who avoid frustrating experiences attempting to “swipe” through a
carousel or navigate between elements. The carousel as we know it will
likely evolve into a more gallery-like interface based on
swipes and navigation rather than a time-based approach.
3. Internet Explorer 9
Praise
the Internet gods! Major Internet corporations now phase out older
versions of Internet Explorer far more quickly than before. Remember,
just a few years ago we had to dumb down user experiences just to ensure
compatibility with IE6. Even worse, the years that went by before we no
longer had to support it. Fast forward to present day, where major
players like
Google and
Facebook are embracing standards-based innovation, forcing Microsoft to either do the same or get left behind.
Praise the Internet gods! [We] now phase out older versions of Internet Explorer far more quicklytweet this
The old “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” philosophy hasn’t really helped in the browser war. IE continues to
lose browser market share to Chrome and will continue to lose ground if
Microsoft
cannot keep up with the beautiful innovations present in Chrome,
Firefox, and even Safari. In November 2013, Google announced that it
will stop supporting IE9, which usually signals that the rest of the UX
community will soon follow suit. This is great for the future, because
your UX can only be as strong as your weakest link. Catering to ancient
IE versions always ensures Microsoft’s browser costs you the ability to
innovate.
4. Skeuomorphism
A hot topic with design nerds, the
skeuomorphism vs.
flat design debate raged all of last year and will likely continue into 2014. Arguably,
Apple has been the biggest proponent of skeumorphism through their
iOS
design choices and their historical majority of users over other mobile
systems (prior to 2013), whereas Google has championed flat design for
years. As
Android
market share increased dramatically—and with Microsoft jumping aboard
the flat train with their new Surface and mobile OS—Apple had to make a
choice: Either continue leading a design trend that feels less fresh
(and debatably creates a less-friendly UI), or embrace this new trend.
With iOS7, Apple went flat, extinguishing the final major skeuomorphism
flame.
5. Flash
Although the previous point tabs Apple as a latecomer to the flat design game, they won the
Flash battle. When Apple launched the
iPhone and
iPad
with the conscious decision not to support Flash and those platforms
took major percentages of web traffic, advertisers, site administrators,
and developers embraced this new “HTML5” fad. Now, in 2013 we’ve seen a
serious decline in Flash advertising, let alone sites built on that
tool. Many of the Flash programmers I know have since embraced
Adobe Edge,
which is supposedly a grasp at regaining some relevance within the web
developer scene, but it seems like too little too late when there are
tons of (arguably better) open source tools available for everything.
Originally released in 2011, with major updates in late 2012, Adobe is
really pushing Edge, and although Flash is still available and
supported, it doesn’t get nearly the developer love it used to. You’d be
hard pressed to find any major sites using Flash components anymore.
6. Web Pages
Web
pages are still around, but they’re undergoing some serious innovation
lately. Not to harp on a previous point, but the quicker we move away
from old IEs that harsh our collective mellow, the sooner we can abandon
individual web pages altogether. This trend is a combination of design
and technical innovations that appeared a couple of years ago and are
now gaining traction. We’ve seen a major shift towards “appification” of
web sites, which has most likely been employed by platforms that
neither need nor want to make native apps to cater to the tablet and
mobile users. Sites like
Quartz, Facebook and Google Apps exemplify this trend, and constantly receive accolades for their approach to UX on the web.
Gawker media was an early adopter of this approach, with a major shift to a
much maligned and short-lived hashbang-driven experience
in 2011. Their site leveraged the pageless design with a
new-at-the-time HTML5 standard called PushState which updated content
asynchronously without refreshing the navigational elements of the page.
Pitchfork.com was another early adopter of this technique and helped
popularize a few tools such as PJAX and TurboLinks, the latter of which
has become a core feature in
Rails 4.
We’ve seen more and more sites move this way, and as the barrier for
implementation lowers, we will see a greater number of sites take this
approach because it makes them leaner, faster, and cheaper to run.
7. Shared Hosting
While
I would say “colos” (short for colocation centers) are on their way
out, they’ll never completely die since major companies require physical
servers (even if we’ll only have Google and Amazon datacenters in the
future). Regardless, the concept of “shared hosting” is something that
makes little to no sense given the massive migration to cloud computing
and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. Why spend $20 per month with
GoDaddy to host something you have no control over, when you could
spend a fraction of that to serve exactly the amount of bandwidth you
need? Why would you also share your server with someone else you can’t
see, creating bottlenecks that you can’t fix? Now, almost every hosting
company (GoDaddy, MediaTemple, etc.) has cloud or virtual server options
to compete with the big dogs like Heroku, Amazon Web Services, and
Google App Engine.
8. “m.” Sites
Until the adoption of
responsive design, there was only one good way to deliver content to
users who visit sites on a tablet or mobile device: read the initial
request, check the user device, and redirect to a mobile version of the
same site. The mobile site had to exist as a separate code base with an
entirely different set of features. Whenever publishers updated one
version of the site, they had to do the same on the other version,
complicating maintenance and driving development costs. That said, there
are reasons why “m.” sites lasted beyond the advent of responsive
design. For example, advertiser platforms took a while to adjust to a
single page being able to deliver two entirely different inventories. To
handle this issue, advertisers had to serve all ads to every page, and
then render only mobile or desktop ads depending on the device. This
specific problem has long since been solved by most ad platforms, and
now that “responsive design” is basically a household term, the cost
benefits of supporting a single platform rather than two presentation
layers are clear.
