Web designs are getting too complicated
58 comments
·June 9, 2025chrismorgan
cupofjoakim
> Awwwards is not representative of the web at large
100%. I used to work at a studio specifically targeting winning awards with awwwards and it's definitely not the same as working on the normal web. Flashiness is way more important than performance there, be it in UX, conversions or load times.
It was a good space to play around with things like animations and webgl, but turns out that if your business needs to convert, those things can often come in the way of that.
arajnoha
thats why i always choose dribbble as a go-to for a nice looking yet not "award winning" stuff
jameslk
Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].
0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...
1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript
3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...
lelanthran
> irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].
I don't know if that is irrelevant to the argument "Web Designs are Getting too Complicated".
The argument as stated is kinda ambiguous.
Lets say I wrote a small web app that consisted of exactly 5 input forms with not more than 4 input elements each, backed by a database of 3 tables.
If my front-end uses a tech depending on eleven 3rd party components (vite, npm, a treeshaker, a linter, react, redux, tailwind, sass, graphql, websockets, typescript) then you can get into the situation where both these things are true:
1. The user PoV is that this is a simple webapp which is easy to use
and
2. The developers PoV is that this is an over-engineered design that could have been done in a day with no build-step nor anything beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript.
jameslk
Yes the fuzzy use of “complicated” is part of the problem with this article. I am assuming “complicated” here means it’s consequential to users from a bad UX perspective because the article mentions some business stats:
> Google's research shows users form opinions about websites in 50 milliseconds. If your site takes over 3 seconds to load, you've lost 53% of mobile users. Amazon found every 100ms delay costs them 1% of sales.
In which case, my argument still stands that they’re focusing on the wrong perf metric (page weight).
The least complicated webpage is a blank page, but users won’t find that too useful. That’s why we don’t use page weight as our North Star in the web perf world
croes
Performance is also an irrelevant metric.
Usability is.
richev
Performance is a feature [0]
jameslk
Performance is not a metric. I mentioned web perf metrics that focus on UX, such as usability: https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics
croes
> User-centric performance metrics
It’s still about performance.
How fast can I use it, how smooth can I use it, etc.
My point is about how good can I do what I want to do on a website.
For instance a shopping site can as fast and snappy as it likes, if I can’t find the right articles is useless. Amazon and ebay come to my mind who ignore even simple exact search terms just to show things I didn’t search for.
PunchyHamster
that's like saying horsepower is irrelevant metric, lap times is
you kinda need the one to get the other in the decent place, even if it is not the only one.
Lack of performance WILL turn every design into mediocre or worse
croes
Bad performance makes even good design bad but good performance doesn’t make bad design good.
Looking at performance is making the second step before the first.
Performance is the means to an end, but if you fixate on performance, the means becomes the end
neya
I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.
Just a sad state of affairs overall.
hatly22
That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up. Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves. People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.
andirk
Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.
neya
I loved this too. The frontpage era content actually still works really well on today's modern screens. Most of them barely have any CSS in them even.
mattmanser
Just to note, HN does not got full width on my screen, and the background is not white.
I pretty much set everything I can to dark mode these days, so personally don't agree with white backgrounds in general.
tokioyoyo
Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.
agumonkey
I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.
null
andirk
Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.
Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.
gloxkiqcza
Well it’s easier to get you hooked and show you more and better targeted ads if you get the app. There’s a value add, it’s just not for you, the user. It’s for Reddit and their customers (advertisers).
k310
Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.
pmontra
Firefox has a reader mode. It does not work on every site, probably because on some sites it can't decide where it's the content. Examples with Firefox nightly on Android: it works on the site this thread is about, it does not work on HN.
k310
Sorry, I missed that. It's right in the URL bar, or it was until I started typing this reply. Not pretty, though. Thanks for pointing it out. The print rendition, original or simplified, is usually great.
pmontra
No worries. By the way, I noticed right now that Reader Mode is available in this page for desktop Firefox but not for Android FF.
andirk
I too use my share of simplifications (Brave Browser, Ghostery, archive.is ) but the fact is until ~2008, web content was auxiliary to the main form of content ingestion via newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. Now that the Web is one of the main forms of content distribution, there's paywalls, ads, newsletter modals. People deserve to get compensated for their contributions, but it's really annoying how poor flashy web design has become ubiquitous at least partially for that reason.
bravesoul2
In using brave (username checks out)
donatj
I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.
jfernandezr
I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks.
It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.
librasteve
turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns
seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day
disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
FinnLobsien
Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching.
I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.
graic
The irony of complaining about over designed sites only to have a hidden form be revealed from the bottom of the page.
> The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery.
websites are art
devrandoom
Websites aren't art. They can be, just like this comment can be art. Especially if I add a fancy made up word to it. Forthedolomaznia.
neepi
So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.
I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.
As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.
Perhaps it's the people?
shoeb00m
Eh, depending on the amount of content on the page astro + react is fine. Astro lets you output everything as static html so it doesn’t hurt your page scores
I find that there is a context switching cost going from react to vanilla html/js/css. So i just default to react on everything.
neepi
They took two days and used react components and all sorts of shit and we nearly missed the deadline due to it.
The page I did was less than 4K with all content and css embedded and took me 10 minutes.
There's doing the job and there's costing the company a boat load of money doing the job.
shoeb00m
Ok fair enough, but I think you just have incompetent devs
jiggawatts
"You see, I have this hammer."
"I need a screw driven."
"Hammer! I have a hammer. Just one. This one."
nilirl
This is an unkind argument.
There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving.
In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.
Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.
Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.
I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.
Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.