Actually a lot of things are usable even if they are askew. Like the Google logo on search is way to the left rather than center. On the other hand, Facebook is complete chaos and totally unusable, for example.
Not directly on their own usability. It was more that they broke the web, since bookmarks, shared URLs, and search engines couldn't navigate them correctly to get the user back to the content that was supposed to display correctly.
The static positioned content we get with CSS and JS hacks I've seen to replicate it a start but not always correct on it's own.
It took me a few refreshes and multiple clicks just to realize I had to scroll down. I don't understand why someone would think unusable could ever be gorgeous. That page has one of the worst layouts I've ever come across and ironically it's supposed to be about enhancing users experience.
It's not like they were completely unusable, it's just showing text in an annoying way.
On the plus side, it's a testament to how nearly anyone could build a website. I'm sure many many people got their feet wet in web dev making simple sites for local businesses because the bar was so low.
Great example; the new Ars Technica gives me a headache. It's clean, but it is impossible to read and harder to navigate. I've been meaning to redesign it myself for fun.
This is very impressive from a technical perspective, but for actual using it, it's truly horrible.
I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.
It is equally confounding on the desktop. But ultimately, I think it was a bad template choice by the author rather than any particular bug in Google Sites. (Two-column with pictures just doesn't work.)
It's usually unlabeled buttons, unlabelled icons, divs that change color on click instead of actual honest to god native HTML checkboxes, inaccessible drag-and-drop, no heading structure which makes navigation harder, weird date pickers that screen readers cannot handle and so on.
Those are all terrible, they are all making the ridiculously incorrect assumption that it is confusing. It's possibly the only site that my Luddite family can make full use of, without ever having asked me for help.
The designs that change the layout make it less usable by preventing you from seeing everything it has to offer on one spectacularly ugly, usable page.
The design that kept mostly everything the same but modernized the colors, fonts and spacing is still worse that the current site: the current site has an effect of the design dissappearing behind the content, and the redesign has the colors and highlights push past the links and draw my attention away.
I'm with you on that. If all blocks in a row were the same height, then a left-right-left scan would be just fine even at 3 or 4 columns. But this is not a left-right-left scan. It is a jaggy left-right-down-left-up-left-down. I never got past that enough with Pinterest to even try to find value in that site. I tolerate it on Facebook but really dislike it. If it had been like that when I first thought of joining Facebook, I may not have even bothered (at least until I was socially shamed for not having a Facebook). And now G+ has it. Oh well. I'll never get my money back for any of these service so they can keep moving my cheese I'll keep bitching about it. ;)
Hah, maybe a middle ground vs gopher. The GDPR mitigation from NPR (https://text.npr.org/) was refreshing. The amount of effort for display capabilities above and beyond moving around plain old text + some markup for layout has been totally out of proportion to the end-user value. I kind of wonder things like, "I wonder how much the memory/cpu it takes to run Slack (just on my laptop) vs total at NASA to design and managed the Apollo 11 mission". Anyway, that's OT enough. It's just that this is such a ridiculous vector that it's irritating.
Useit.com is neither pretty nor useable.
The content is good, the presentation is subpar (and I remember when it was even worse).
Yes, it is accessible, and yes, you can read the content. It is still far cry from usability.
reply