Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing.
It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll. Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using iPhone 13 I’ve got like two text lines visible!
I despise the full-background, 4K video pages.
Makes connecting from bad cells a royal pain.
But some of the dependency libraries can be almost as bad.
I don't like 1MB pages, so a button can be animated.
"Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism"
Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years
In the long run, Flash was a blip on the web. 2004-2010 tops.
NNGroup "best practices" have been obsolete for at least 15 years, because the purpose of a website is no longer about displaying free information. Websites have become a fully commercial enterprise focused on conversion, so every trick in the book is used:
- Infinite scroll and autoplaying video on social media and blogspam sites
- Layouts shifting after content load because of the Javascript ad delay
- "Other Articles you might like" blocks in the middle of an article
- "Subscribe to our email newsletter" popups/modals everywhere
- "You are reading 1 of x free articles" dickbars
and that's just scratching the surface.
I think most practical designers saw the value of what Nielsen was showing but hated how he completely eschewed aesthetics. Fortunately the advent of CSS and the need for responsive mobile design forced everyone to learn how to integrate functionality with aesthetics.