"the rummage" and tactility in web design

[villain]

I started writing this as part of my update post in the Personal Announcements thread and then realised it was perhaps too much and also would be more interesting to open up discussion elsewhere. 

Keeping with my ethos of using nostalgia for the earlier days of the web to inform functionality and content instead of purely aesthetics, I spent some time over the weekend looking through early 00's fansites. Here are some examples:
Suta Raito (Neopets and Anime fanpage)
Rocket Rocks (Pokémon Team Rocket fanpage)
PikaSurf (Pokémon and Beyblade fanpage)

There's something so alluring about a big navigation bar with options enough to fill the whole vertical space of the page. A lot of the ones I looked at didn't have much in each section, and were clearly written by a teenager in an afternoon - but something about that quantity over quality mindset makes the sites feel a lot of fun to explore, as you have to manually click each option. It's more tactile, almost like manually rummaging through all the cds or vinyls in the rack at a record shop. I'm interested in how much I'm noticing this difference in physicality and more 'resistance' in comparison to scrolling, either by thumb or by scrollwheel. I suppose this isn't unlike the difference a good control scheme can make to a videogame's "gamefeel".

I realise this was a little rambly but what do you guys think on this topic? Do you also feel this tactile engagement with non-infinite-scroll sites?

[nuclearblues]

I think this is a really interesting topic, and one I don't see brought up often in web design discussions. I suppose it's viewed as clunky or obfuscating access to information by the standards of corporatized design. but that design mindset is very heavily informed by the fact that the majority of people access the internet via smartphone. I have a huge and extremely loud cheap usb mouse from 2009 that I have had since I was a kid so the sound of clicking is sort of inherently associated with happy things for me, and as a result makes me happy in and of itself. you don't get that sort of tactile connection on a smartphone; all interaction is materially silent and there is a tactile sameness. scrolling and clicking and typing don't have obvious differences in the same way as you get with a computer. therefore I think the shift we've seen towards seamless scrolling makes sense within this design mindset.

however, I'm super stubborn, hate using a smartphone, hate using apps, and hate being advertised to constantly. I associate these things with this design mindset, and gravitate towards clunkier and archaic design. I think you also get a much better content separation with the tactile act of clicking. a complaint I often see about the layout of things like tiktok is the tonal whiplash that comes with swiping from one video to an entirely unrelated video. I've never felt this when, say, clicking a random page on a webring. this is entirely anecdotal and might be coincidental, but I think psychologically we really like feeling connected to what we are seeing, and that active engagement of clicking on something vs passive engagement of letting the next video autoplay engages us in a way.

[PurpleHello98]

I agree! I think part of it is that, even if the pages themselves are smaller, unless they're only a paragraph each, a site having a lot of pages makes the Web-site feel bigger. As long as there's some depth, I prioritize breadth, although having both to some extent is ideal. I also think the tactility probably has a lot to do with it---clicking things is so much more fun than infinite scrolling! And it feels more like you're engaging with whatever site you're on actively---like a conversation as opposed to a lecture. Really, I think social media is a lot like a lecture---information being shoved down your throat ad infinidum.

however, I'm super stubborn, hate using a smartphone, hate using apps, and hate being advertised to constantly. I associate these things with this design mindset, and gravitate towards clunkier and archaic design. I think you also get a much better content separation with the tactile act of clicking. a complaint I often see about the layout of things like tiktok is the tonal whiplash that comes with swiping from one video to an entirely unrelated video. I've never felt this when, say, clicking a random page on a webring. this is entirely anecdotal and might be coincidental, but I think psychologically we really like feeling connected to what we are seeing, and that active engagement of clicking on something vs passive engagement of letting the next video autoplay engages us in a way.

I agree on pretty much every point! There's a reason why my site's always had a very GeoCities-inspired look, why I like using Windows XP or 7 themes, etc. (By the way, is it just me or have GeoCities-inspired themes fallen mostly out of popularity in favour of 2000s-inspired themes on Web-sites?) Anyways, maybe part of the reason going from site to site doesn't have so much tonal whiplash is because A) the written word is a lot less low-key and B) sites tend to have quite a few things in common---general layout types, common types of pages, as well as often some sort of Web revival philosophy---and yet are clearly separate from each other, whereas I feel like Tik Tok, since it's one app and the videos at least seem more directly related to one another, is more prone to mood whiplash.

[Semper]

I love the rummaging nature of personal websites. My site is fairly easy to navigate for my most part, but I do have multiple file paths that people need to get through to get to say, a piece of art, or writing. I like to envision my site as a slow feeder bowl for anyone who is coming to it from one of the scrolling platforms.

I actually find scrolling platforms to be fascinating. I think it's a pretty ballsy move to just have all the bandwidth sucking data out in the open and autoplaying for anyone who happens to drift past it. I know that this is in part so these platforms can slip autoplaying ads in between user made content, but the payoff of someone seeing an ad for two seconds and then scrolling immediately away mustn't be enough for the cost of managing the data transfer for everything else. It explains why these platforms are hemorrhaging money and some of them have started blocking views from anyone that doesn't already have an account or the app on their phone (I'm thinking of Tumblr, X, and Tiktok that do this in particular).

Though most of my site is made for rummaging, I do have at least one space that is built to be infinite scroll, but it's only text so its appeal is limited to anyone who would take the time to actually read.

[wygolvillage]

I always used the word "friction" to describe this sort of thing, this obfuscated and tactile kind of design, and I find websites with more "friction" to be more interesting to explore, and go down little corridors.

I hate infinite scroll since it's way too easy to lose your place in what you're reading, that always ticked me off about the Tumblr dashboard.

On the main portion of my site I conciously stick to this "friction" idea- you'll find that the main menu of pages and directories is only available on my homepage rather than being an ever-present sidebar, so it encourages you to pick a "pathway" and go down it until it's time to return. I find if I always have the option to click another page onscreen all the time it makes me start skimming a bit, so I usually prefer the more "inconvenient" option.

Quantity over quality is an interesting thing to mention since it reminds me of my earliest memories of making my site, wanting to include as many pages as I can without really thinking about what exactly I'd put on them.

[villain]

@wygolvillage I think the lack of menus is a very good point, I do that too! I have "article pages" like my tutorials and monthly album reviews that are the longest form text on my site, so I intentionally have them sit on their own with no navigation bars drawing the reader's attention away. I appreciate this kind of thing myself as a distractable user 

[Memory]

Oh man I love clicking on things. I play tons of idle games, and if you ever see one, the biggest element in their design is the abundance of things to click on! (FarmRPG and Melvor Idle are very good examples of this.) I love when sites have menus to interact with. It does feel like I'm doing something, whereas infinite scrolling feels mindless and content is consumed without much thought.

I always used the word "friction" to describe this sort of thing, this obfuscated and tactile kind of design, and I find websites with more "friction" to be more interesting to explore, and go down little corridors.

I love the term "friction" used for this kind of design. I feel like it's the best way to describe the time it takes to stop and actually sift through a site and it's contents. I thought of this design to be like a treat mat (the ones where you give pets to manually dig through to find food) it's both mentally stimulating and rewarding!