Modern theory and practice of web design
Next comes the text of the first section of my thesis “Usability in web 2.0”, which I am writing now. This section describes the emergence of web-design and the arrival in this area of knowledge and experience of HCI (human-computer-iteraction), as a result, the emergence of usability. And at the end information about trends in the modern development of the web.
Immediately after the creation of the World Wide Web, it was primarily used by academic institutions, governments and the military, as a means of exchanging simple information of the “old” sample. So the documents of those times were very simple. In the end, scientists and academicians do not have much to do with the attractiveness of web pages.
The world's first website appeared August 6, 1991. http://info.cern.ch/ Its creator Tim Berners-Lee (Tim Burners-Lee) has published on it a description of the World Wide Web (WWW) technology based on the HTTP data transfer protocol, the URI addressing system, and the HTML hypertext markup language . Also on the site were described the principles of installation and operation of web servers and web browsers. The site also became the world's first online catalog, as Tim Berners-Lee later posted a list of links to other sites.
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Recall what were the first sites. Or - red letters on a turquoise background (schoolchildren now have such sites on narod. Ru, and even that seems like a parody), or - very beautiful, very heavy and completely non-functional resources. Clearly expensive. Clearly made by professionals. But - by professionals in some completely different field. Beauty and functionality did not find points of contact. Ugliness, however, too - but the ugly sites, at least, were cheaper for the owners.
So, it’s not surprising that beauty has become a web designer’s dodger for almost a decade. It is ugly, but in principle, functional Internet resources set the fashion for many years to come. The design requirements were very simple: it should be invisible. It should not interfere with the visitor to get acquainted with the commercial offer. That, given the origin, is not surprising: de facto this approach meant that the site should not be scary. The site is a tool. The beauty of the tool is in its functionality.
On the other hand, the development of design was hampered by undeveloped technology. Until now, new standards have been adopted on the Internet, expanding the freedom of activity for web-designers. This html 5, and CSS 3, as well as developing technologies such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight. In the early stages of its development, the web was a very limited information environment. At the beginning, HTML was simple: HTML tags were used only to indicate that this is a heading, which is a paragraph, and so on.
And then a thing called the “graphical browser” (NCSA Mosaic) was born. People began to include graphic elements of graphics in their pages. And they wanted their pages to look better, more attractive, prettier. Then, HTML was expanded to include modeling tags, such as bold, strong, italicisized.
And people were still not satisfied: they wanted more. And the ability to add more style to the text came in the form of a tag , a tag, and so on. Now people could create pages with colorful backgrounds and fonts, almost as they wanted.
However, this was not enough. People who called themselves "designers" came on the scene. Since many of them came from the world of paper design, they wanted even more control over the appearance of the web pages being created.
In 1996, a very influential book by David Seagal was published under the title “Creating Killer Web Sites”, and soon it became a number 1 bestseller on Amazon — an unthinkable achievement for a book on web design.
The page layout system described in this book was mainly based on the use of HTML tables and single-pixel GIFs. The page is laid out on the grid; the content, be it text or graphics, was placed in the cells of this grid. To prevent “folding” of empty table cells, transparent GIFs of 1 × 1 pixel size were used. Seagal (and not only him) went further, and suggested using single-pixel GIFs as a means of managing the gaps between letters in the text, and in order to create indents.
The emergence of such methods allowed designers to create visually appealing pages, putting an aesthetic aspect in the sites along with the functional one.
However, everything is good in moderation, and at some point it became obvious that designers can not always cope with the opportunities provided to them. Were increasingly appear sites in which due to unsuccessful design it was impossible to read the information. Long menus, broken across the page, a huge number of flashing gif-banners, bright colors, contrasting text, poorly thought-out navigation, large heavy pages — these are characteristic signs of web design of that time.
At this point, it came to the realization that when creating a site you need to think about the convenience of the user. The application of HCI models (Human-Computer-Iteraction, human-computer interaction) to the web has begun.
The HCI discipline is based on psychology and it allows experts to complex social interactions surrounding the new computing technology. These models allowed researchers to develop various recommendations and rules for creating web interfaces. Later, HCI on the web was reborn into usability.
One of the founders of usability was Jacob Nielsen. It was he who published the book Designing web usability in 1999. The practice of simplicity ( Web design: the book by Jacob Nielsen ), which became one of the first (and most significant at that time) guide to creating usable sites.
At the same time, a revolution also took place inside HCI. HCI, traditionally based on processing models of cognitive psychology, now uses such branches of knowledge as ethnography, linguistics and communication theory, as well as culture and the humanities. All this is necessary in order to improve the understanding of the person who works at the computer in the Internet era.
Of course, the Internet boom could not last long. It seemed to too many people that they knew the needs and desires of their users, but, nevertheless, they never thought about using development methods that were oriented to the needs of users. The poor quality of business models has led many companies to simply throw out huge amounts of money to create products that no one could and did not want to use.
However, the idea that this was the signal for the end of the Internet was premature. Those companies that were able to provide useful and convenient services survived. Usability and HCI have proven their worth in preventing design risks. In addition to using usability methods for web services, they are also used in the design of mobile systems. Since the late 1990s, mobile devices have expanded the ways in which we interact with computers and with each other. Mobile phones, personal digital devices (PDA) and wireless networks have given rise to a new concept of ubiquitous computing: a world in which technology is everywhere, but it is in the background. People have ceased to be users of single, isolated devices, people have become residents of digital communities. Obviously, systems that have such a fundamental impact on the way we function can not be developed using old technologies. Human-centered systems require human-centered design, and this is a challenge for usability for the next decade.
Currently, there are two trends in the development of the World Wide Web: the semantic web and the social web. The semantic web suggests the improvement of the coherence and relevance of information on the World Wide Web through the introduction of new metadata formats. The social web relies on work to streamline the information available on the Web by the users of the Web themselves. In the framework of the second direction, developments that are part of the semantic web are actively used as tools (RSS and other formats of web feeds, OPML, XHTML microformats).
There is also a popular concept of Web 2.0, summarizing several areas of the World Wide Web.
Modern websites are turning into increasingly complex systems, using a variety of technologies. The following trends are clearly visible in the modern web:
Content
- The history of web design from technical graphics to modern sites
- The origin of ideas about usability sites
- The current stage of web development
The history of web design from technical graphics to modern sites
Immediately after the creation of the World Wide Web, it was primarily used by academic institutions, governments and the military, as a means of exchanging simple information of the “old” sample. So the documents of those times were very simple. In the end, scientists and academicians do not have much to do with the attractiveness of web pages.
The world's first website appeared August 6, 1991. http://info.cern.ch/ Its creator Tim Berners-Lee (Tim Burners-Lee) has published on it a description of the World Wide Web (WWW) technology based on the HTTP data transfer protocol, the URI addressing system, and the HTML hypertext markup language . Also on the site were described the principles of installation and operation of web servers and web browsers. The site also became the world's first online catalog, as Tim Berners-Lee later posted a list of links to other sites.
')
Recall what were the first sites. Or - red letters on a turquoise background (schoolchildren now have such sites on narod. Ru, and even that seems like a parody), or - very beautiful, very heavy and completely non-functional resources. Clearly expensive. Clearly made by professionals. But - by professionals in some completely different field. Beauty and functionality did not find points of contact. Ugliness, however, too - but the ugly sites, at least, were cheaper for the owners.
So, it’s not surprising that beauty has become a web designer’s dodger for almost a decade. It is ugly, but in principle, functional Internet resources set the fashion for many years to come. The design requirements were very simple: it should be invisible. It should not interfere with the visitor to get acquainted with the commercial offer. That, given the origin, is not surprising: de facto this approach meant that the site should not be scary. The site is a tool. The beauty of the tool is in its functionality.
On the other hand, the development of design was hampered by undeveloped technology. Until now, new standards have been adopted on the Internet, expanding the freedom of activity for web-designers. This html 5, and CSS 3, as well as developing technologies such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight. In the early stages of its development, the web was a very limited information environment. At the beginning, HTML was simple: HTML tags were used only to indicate that this is a heading, which is a paragraph, and so on.
And then a thing called the “graphical browser” (NCSA Mosaic) was born. People began to include graphic elements of graphics in their pages. And they wanted their pages to look better, more attractive, prettier. Then, HTML was expanded to include modeling tags, such as bold, strong, italicisized.
And people were still not satisfied: they wanted more. And the ability to add more style to the text came in the form of a tag , a tag, and so on. Now people could create pages with colorful backgrounds and fonts, almost as they wanted.
However, this was not enough. People who called themselves "designers" came on the scene. Since many of them came from the world of paper design, they wanted even more control over the appearance of the web pages being created.
In 1996, a very influential book by David Seagal was published under the title “Creating Killer Web Sites”, and soon it became a number 1 bestseller on Amazon — an unthinkable achievement for a book on web design.
The page layout system described in this book was mainly based on the use of HTML tables and single-pixel GIFs. The page is laid out on the grid; the content, be it text or graphics, was placed in the cells of this grid. To prevent “folding” of empty table cells, transparent GIFs of 1 × 1 pixel size were used. Seagal (and not only him) went further, and suggested using single-pixel GIFs as a means of managing the gaps between letters in the text, and in order to create indents.
The emergence of such methods allowed designers to create visually appealing pages, putting an aesthetic aspect in the sites along with the functional one.
The origin of ideas about usability sites
However, everything is good in moderation, and at some point it became obvious that designers can not always cope with the opportunities provided to them. Were increasingly appear sites in which due to unsuccessful design it was impossible to read the information. Long menus, broken across the page, a huge number of flashing gif-banners, bright colors, contrasting text, poorly thought-out navigation, large heavy pages — these are characteristic signs of web design of that time.
At this point, it came to the realization that when creating a site you need to think about the convenience of the user. The application of HCI models (Human-Computer-Iteraction, human-computer interaction) to the web has begun.
The HCI discipline is based on psychology and it allows experts to complex social interactions surrounding the new computing technology. These models allowed researchers to develop various recommendations and rules for creating web interfaces. Later, HCI on the web was reborn into usability.
One of the founders of usability was Jacob Nielsen. It was he who published the book Designing web usability in 1999. The practice of simplicity ( Web design: the book by Jacob Nielsen ), which became one of the first (and most significant at that time) guide to creating usable sites.
At the same time, a revolution also took place inside HCI. HCI, traditionally based on processing models of cognitive psychology, now uses such branches of knowledge as ethnography, linguistics and communication theory, as well as culture and the humanities. All this is necessary in order to improve the understanding of the person who works at the computer in the Internet era.
Of course, the Internet boom could not last long. It seemed to too many people that they knew the needs and desires of their users, but, nevertheless, they never thought about using development methods that were oriented to the needs of users. The poor quality of business models has led many companies to simply throw out huge amounts of money to create products that no one could and did not want to use.
However, the idea that this was the signal for the end of the Internet was premature. Those companies that were able to provide useful and convenient services survived. Usability and HCI have proven their worth in preventing design risks. In addition to using usability methods for web services, they are also used in the design of mobile systems. Since the late 1990s, mobile devices have expanded the ways in which we interact with computers and with each other. Mobile phones, personal digital devices (PDA) and wireless networks have given rise to a new concept of ubiquitous computing: a world in which technology is everywhere, but it is in the background. People have ceased to be users of single, isolated devices, people have become residents of digital communities. Obviously, systems that have such a fundamental impact on the way we function can not be developed using old technologies. Human-centered systems require human-centered design, and this is a challenge for usability for the next decade.
The current stage of web development
Currently, there are two trends in the development of the World Wide Web: the semantic web and the social web. The semantic web suggests the improvement of the coherence and relevance of information on the World Wide Web through the introduction of new metadata formats. The social web relies on work to streamline the information available on the Web by the users of the Web themselves. In the framework of the second direction, developments that are part of the semantic web are actively used as tools (RSS and other formats of web feeds, OPML, XHTML microformats).
There is also a popular concept of Web 2.0, summarizing several areas of the World Wide Web.
Modern websites are turning into increasingly complex systems, using a variety of technologies. The following trends are clearly visible in the modern web:
- Use open API successful projects. The possibilities of Internet solutions are growing with each new startup. The time is coming when developers will have to choose, either to provide users with modern solutions built on third-party services, or to try to keep up with market innovations, relying only on their own strength.
An example of creating a photo gallery using Flickr
An example of integration of the Google Analytics and CakePHP statistics service
Open API List - Using AJAX, javascript and various frameworks (eg, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash)
- Support sites of various mobile devices
- Use of media information (streaming video, podcasts)
- Unification of authorization services in large companies. The growing popularity of OpenID ( http://www.openid.net ) makes this solution a leader. However, other solutions are used, such as SAML, Liberty and MS Passport.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/24114/
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