5 things to celebrate (and facepalm) from the web in 2020
It wouldn’t be December without a review of the year that is fast drawing to a close. While I know 2020 was a year that many would rather forget than actually look back and review, there were some real silver-linings that appeared through the dark clouds of adversity.
From the world of the web in 2020, I’ve picked out 2 moves to be celebrated, 2 to facepalm and 1 to watch for 2021.
🎉 Dark mode
Not a day too early, more and more mobile apps and websites began to add dark mode features. Previously, a feature requiring developers to inverse the text and background colours was nigh on impossible. Not so anymore! I was one of the many who used our phones’ generic ‘invert colours’ functionality to flip the colours around. While this approach generally works well for text, it also inverts images, meaning that I need to uninvert the colours to see the image clearly (and then re-invert to continue reading text).
There are also still many website and apps that are horrendous for dark mode viewing — here’s looking at you Facebook, Confluence, Yammer. The websites seem to have a built-in ‘feature’ that detects when your colours are inverted and automatically uninverts them back to black text on white background. I really hope it is on their roadmaps to fix this painful experience.
🤦♂️ GDPR cookie consent
The proliferation of cookie consent popups accelerated, and we must be almost at a point now where more websites have it than don’t. If you could count the number of accept, decline or close clicks across the whole world, you could attribute thousands and thousands of wasted hours with these annoying messages. What percentage of people actually read the message? Government interference here has resulted in a poorer user experience. I am hoping that in the future this requirement is either repealed or that web browsers and app developers work out smarter ways to handle the consent question.
🎉 Two-factor authentication is getting smarter
We’ve seen websites increase their security through stronger password requirements and SMS message 6 digit-code (aka two-factor authentication). Thankfully many of the bigger websites are now using specific authenticator apps (Adobe, Microsoft to name a couple) that resolve the clunky process of checking your text message inbox and typing out the numbers into a text field. I am still impressed when I see a website on my computer update automatically as a result of a mobile phone trigger.
🤦♂️ Popups popups popups
Sign up to our newsletter, register an account, accept notifications, provide location. I remember when the ‘sign up to our newsletter’ popups first started appearing and the results were outstanding. Sure, it was a little bit annoying, but the uplift in conversions was unignorable. As users became fatigued with the volume and annoyance of popups, their effectiveness waned. Beyond that, it’s just a non-customer-friendly decision that organisations are willing to put users through in order to meet their website goals. As you can tell from this paragraph — I’m not a big fan of popups
👀 One to watch: Neumorphism
Skeuomorphism, aka design imitating real world objects, has returned to our screens. Now with a fancy new name, what’s old in interface design is seemingly new again. The subtle nuances of neumorphism may be easily spotted by interface designers but are a little harder for most of us to recognise. A common example is the shading of buttons and other form controls that make the button look more realistically placement on the background. As you can see from the below image, the change is not overt, but it may herald the beginning of a movement.
Will Neumorphism take off and we’ll be transported back to a digital world of metaphors. Only time will tell!
- What were your web highlights from 2020?
Happy New Year! 2020 is finally over.
