February 05, 2025
With surprising regularity, I find myself in a public restroom, perhaps in a restaurant, pausing to look at the sink’s faucet and wonder: how does it work? How do I get water to come out of this tap? For an able-bodied adult like myself, this should be simple. But no—some faucet designers seem determined to reinvent one of humanity’s most basic tools, not for improvement, but for the sake of attention.
There are times when making something clever, weird, or unpredictable is, if not useful, at least unobtrusive. Fashion often embraces unnecessary details purely as a statement, breaking from its utilitarian roots. Take a pair of jeans covered in random zippers—sure, it’s weird, but at least only the wearer has to deal with it!
When Tesla announced the Cybertruck, it was pitched to the world as something that was going to break all of the rules previously established in favor of making the world’s most capable and innovative truck. Those intentions do wonders for marketing, but in this particular case, the result was not the world’s most capable truck but instead one of the most repugnant vehicles ever made. Steel body panels? Incredibly dangerous for anyone who happens to be hit by a Cybertruck and incredibly expensive for the Cybertruck owner who needs to repair the collision damage. Drive-by-wire steering? Perhaps a novel innovation, but an expensive solution still in search of a problem. Pick-up trucks are, by nature, utilitarian tools. Reinventing the idea without adding any meaningful benefit is no different than making a faucet no one knows how to turn on.
So what does any of this have to do with web or product design? There happens to be a similar subset of the web design world where basic everyday faucet-like interactions like clicking or scrolling are “hijacked” - that is, taken out of the user’s hands or designed to work unlike the user’s common understanding for the sake of… being cool? Not only that, but the engineers responsible for building these experiences usually expend considerably more effort building them than they would just following conventions. I won’t mince words: this is stupid. Choosing to make a website more difficult to use for the sake of aesthetics is no different than choosing to make a set of stairs more dangerous to climb or a chair more difficult to sit in. Imagine intentionally investing additional time or money to do that.
To be clear, I love weird artsy shit in the correct context. There are times when a little asymmetry or some touch of “it’s not supposed to be like that” sparks pleasure or conveys something meaningful. I also understand that some brands want their website to reflect their own company’s innovative and boundary-breaking personality. But when it actively gets in the way of what it was designed to do, no matter how clever or chic it looks, it’s not art—it’s bad design.