Why is simple navigation becoming so rare on modern websites?
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Needed to update my account details on a tool I use.
Instead of a clear settings button, I was greeted with floating menus autoplaying videos and popups asking me to upgrade my plan. It took way longer than it should have to find a basic link.
The site looked amazing, but the experience was exhausting.
Designers often focus so much on aesthetics that they forget why people visit the site in the first place. A site doesn't need to be fancy to be amazing it just needs to make sense.
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what makes this worse than it looks is that the two things are owned by different people.
the popup asking you to upgrade is somebody's growth metric with their name on it. the settings link is nobody's metric. so in any prioritisation meeting one of them gets defended and the other one gets moved.
nobody ever decided that account details should be hard to find. it just lost every argument it was ever in, because there is no dashboard anywhere that goes down when it gets worse.
I searched for account details for ages yesterday and finally found it hidden behind three tiny icons somewhere.