Websites in the 90s have a lot of clutter. Yahoo is the typical example. A page full of links to every topic imaginable, poorly arranged in seemingly arbitrary order. It’s a good thing they were a search engine too, but you might forget that sometimes.

yahoo

In the 90s websites were new to people, like a new puppy everyone wanted their own. The problem was that the web wasn’t ready for all this attention. People rushed to get a website for every topic you can imagine which led to internet proverbs like “if you can think of it, chances are you’ll find it on the internet!”

The result was clutter. People were creating too much junk and it became too hard to find something you need. Search engines were invented to reduce clutter and help us find what we want.

Search is by no means a solved problem, but it was remarkably successful at filtering out clutter. The problem with search engines is that they can’t read your mind (yet), they don’t know who you are or what you like. So to use a search engine, you have to already know what you want, and you must be able to summarize it in a few key words. People soon ran out of interesting things to search for, which led to content aggregation websites to spawn up everywhere collecting interesting links from all over the web. This eventually led to the rise of social media and user filtered content websites like digg and twitter which is the next step in solving the pin-of-useful-content-in-a-haystack-of-clutter problem. Although it seems to be creating a lot more clutter problems of it’s own. Everything we invent to solve the clutter problem on the internet seems to create more and different kinds of clutter. Twitter I would argue is the biggest collection of useless clutter on the internet. I’ll save that rant for another post.

There is another problem that search engines doesn’t solve. Yahoo and many news websites dealt with clutter by creating more clutter. They put every topic imaginable on their home page, and by trying to cater to everyone’s needs, they ended up catering for no one. Yahoo is still like that today, so was msn search until Bing came along a few month ago. These websites are stuck in the 90s. Search engines and social media doesn’t solve this problem because the problem is isolated on individual webpages, not entire websites.

Luckily, you can safely ignore news websites with too much clutter. It’s the crappy websites that sell good products that are annoying (not crappy websites that sell crappy products, because you can safely ignore them too), because you’re forced to use them. A general way to know if a website has too much clutter is with what I call the “control-F” index. F for find, but also F for frustrating. The more times you have to use ctr+F on a website just to find the link you’re looking for, the more frustrating it is to use.

Pop-up menus are off the charts in the ctr-f index because you have to mouse over them to find what you need, so are complicated company websites built in flash. It’s impossible to find any information on them.

The original website that inspired this rant is this website. Allegedly, they make a pretty good product (the best one out there for anyone developing GWT applications in eclipse), but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their website. They have both a good product and a crappy website. This is inconsistent.

Web2.0 websites are simple and elegant. When you’ve filtered out and ignored the ones that sell crappy products, what you’re left with are websites with good products and good web design. That’s consistent. Consistency makes a huge difference in the user experience, and user experience matters–just ask Apple. People often confuse good user experience (something they like) with benevolence (something else they like), so it came as a surprise when Apple rejected the Google voice app for the iPhone which was going to make phone calls much cheaper for the user.

To companies with good products and crappy products out there: If you provide users with something they like, users will automatically assume that you’re benevolent and likeable as well! If you’re selling a good product, you should use this to your advantage. Upgrade your website and make it consistent with the quality of the product you’re selling. It’ll be a better experience for users which will turn into better marketing for you.