There are hundreds (thousands?) of commercial content-heavy websites that continually track engagement metrics and A/B test design differences all the time, and virtually every single one of them has chosen to bet their collective livelihoods on richer and more interactive media.
A/B testing is a form of markov-chain-monte-carlo experimentation that makes certain assumptions about the landscape it is trying to find the maximum likelihood in. Specifically, it makes the assumption of monotonicity of the likelihood or that the lack of monotonicity is of the same scale as the changes they are likely to make. A/B testing cannot break out of a local maximum of the likelihood function if the assumptions are incorrect.
A complete rewrite of the application from media heavy to plain is far smaller than the typical stepsize used in A/B testing and has some temporal effects on top of it.
Sure, but you’re implying something super weird, namely that there’s a global maximum of engagement at the “text and CSS” extreme end of the spectrum, but as soon as you add any multimedia at all, even a single img tag, there’s a discontinuous drop and then the metrics improve the more and more you add even more multimedia.
I don't think I am saying that. I am saying that the radius of curvature of a peak is potentially greater than the typical step size used in A/B testing. No discontinuity is needed, the landscape could be completely smooth.
I'm not suggesting that the extreme of text + css only is what epitomizes a good minimalist page either. I'm just pointing out that it is absolutely not a given that A/B testing has shown that the global maxima is not near it.
The article isn’t merely arguing that users prefer rich content, other things being equal. It is arguing that users prefer paywalled rich content to free plain content. This is not the kind of thing typically measured by A/B testing.
Well, they say they researched it: "Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity."
They understand how much more expensive an image and JS heavy site is to develop and host, so they must have good reason to go through the trouble?
While that sounds reasonable, I wouldn't bet on it. I have seen too many inane bloat that was implemented simply because the designer/developer/project manager thought it was a cool thing to have or because they read it on some growth-hack thoughtpiece somewhere.
Indeed, that's all too common. It could also be a fluid thing. Huge images and lots of interactivity are in now, but it'll go too far (arguably has) and people may want to swing the pendulum back.
Very often institutions decide stupidly, when the decision is made by people that are not domain experts. Also, numbers may lie. If they did not study the same content with interactive and plain presentation, for example. I recall an article on a murder in Iceland on BBC IIRC, it was overtly interactive, every movement on the touch pad causing unpredictable changes to the page, but the content was so interesting that I put up with it.
Without being able to see what research they actually did/scruitinize their methodology, I don't find the claim that they checked very compelling. Humans are crazy-hard to study -- research that's not even peer reviewed is basically worthless.
This struck me as an interesting statement too. Especially with "thin" versions of site surfacing, for example thin.npr.org, it seems like people are more accepting of the trade of loading gifs and high Def images for speed.
Along the same lines, the article seems to be comparing the cost of serving plain text in 2001 to serving media in 2018. Even simple web hosting used to be much more expensive and difficult to set up.
Designers design for other designers. They are barely aware of users, and wouldn’t care even if they were.
This is a ridiculous generalization. There are good designers and bad designers in the world. The fact that I have 20 apps pinned to my task bar in Windows that I find enjoyable to use on a daily basis is proof that some designers are capable of making things that their users like to use.
Citation needed. This comes up quite often, and people like to assume they know what users want all the time. But is there actual, scientific evidence that, given the same content, a plain HTML+CSS web page that's not interactive but well put together is less compelling to users than a JS-heavy, interactive, overengineered, ad-ridden, tracker-infested and bloated one? Moreover, where do we get the backing evidence for the currently-popular aesthetic choices other than the subjective taste of designers themselves?