There's a decent amount of research that has found that putting things in non-standard locations impairs most users' ability to accomplish what they want on your website.
The Nielsen Norman Group is a decent place to find some of this research. There's some decent information here about how conventional layouts tend to be more effective:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-...
and how placing logos in the center instead of on the left often prevents users from accomplishing their goals:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/centered-logos/
and the reason all of this matters is that the computer skills of a typical person using your website are probably far, far worse than you think they are:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
so if you deviate from the "standard" layout too much, you'll hurt your website's business value because people won't be able to use it effectively.
I think there's still lots of room for creativity within a standard layout. But too much creativity might result in a site that looks better from an aesthetic standpoint but is less effective at actually delivering business value.
You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ...
> Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
GDPR cookie settings? Imprint? Privacy statements?
> Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have.
> Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations.
Sorry ;-)
Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring).
On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention.
Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer).
I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing.
I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.
Similarly, any user experience study of a website isn't going to find that you should make your menu some diagonal shimmering nonsense, or try to convey information on the side of a spinning cube or any of that sort of thing.
Design != Art !!!
If designer is more interested in fulfilling his artistic/creative ambitions than business value for client (making things great looking, stable and reasonably easy to implement -> in budget), he shouldn't even touch digital today. It's too complex and filled with too many constraints.
But if same designer wants to make decent money, well...
With tablets like the iPad, the monitor is the keyboard, and your arm does block your view. Maybe it is 'silly' but a whole lot of people buy and use them.
There's been lots of other laptop designs, and they seemed much less silly to me than tablets. Compaq used to put the trackball on the right side of the case (even lefties I know mouse right-handed). HP made a laptop with a little pop-out mouse, which didn't even require a surface to place it on. IBM made a keyboard wider than the case, which unfolded when the lid was opened.
Everyone I know who tried or owned these laptops loved them. Why did they die out?
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/lenovo-w700ds-laptop-rev...
They demoed it and apparently the unit they demoed was stolen when they were leaving the show.
Not going to lie, I’d love an Acer Iconia style portable at this point. Wouldn’t use it for desktop publishing or probably anything with heavy typing, but just seems like a fun form factor.
Websites are far faster than they've ever been in the past, even with the bloat of frameworks and fonts. Most sites load in < 5s these days. That was not the case 15 years ago.
With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.
I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.
It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.
And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.
Yes they could be faster, but most are still useful at a 5 second load time.
In what is most likely a parallel universe that I inhabit, websites have been getting consistently slower for a while. No amount of edge black magic can compensate for the growing bloat of fonts, frameworks, multiple-dozen-megabytes background videos, and half a thousand requests to ad networks.
I had a cable modem 15 years ago. Pages loaded faster, even though I had 1/10th the bandwidth that I do now.
Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere.
Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity.
Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly.
Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this.
Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.