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Comment by 21echoes | Hacker News Reader

(Most) all websites should look the same. Most browsers look the same. Most car dashes look the same. Most newspapers look the same. Most books look the same.

The web is not art. At least, not most of the time. Websites should only look markedly different with good reason. For most clients, there is not a good reason.

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> "Most car dashes look the same"...

Not sure what cars you've been driving, but search for 'car dash' on google images and bask in the differences.

Saying that all websites should look the same might be reasonable when you're talking about one network or brand, but outside of that, creativity should be explored, encouraged and rewarded.

Who wants a world with every restaurant, bar, urban design or any design looking the same? Good design and UX has nothing to do with copying your neighbour's layout and changing a few colours. Just because that's frequently done, doesn't mean these cookie-cut sites deserve any praise other than "good copy 'n paste job mate".

> Not sure what cars you've been driving, but search for 'car dash' on google images and bask in the differences.

They are all minor/semi-major style differences. But in the end they all have a round wheel, some buttons in the middle and some form of RPM+speed meters.

Definitely wouldn't say I am basking in differences.

You don't drive a Renault, do you.

You're describing content, not form. Many websites also have to show the same things (login button => speedometer) but they don't have to look the same.

It struck me recently that most cars are increasingly looking the same. It used to be that Peugeots had a very typical nose, Volkswagens had their own boring but efficient look, Volvos were kinda blocky. These days I can barely tell the make of a car by looking at the lines, and that's because they all need to perform the same function: transport a similar number of people at similar speed with as low fuel consumption as possible. So they all have basically the same streamlined lines.

Most websites want their navigation to be found, so they put it in the same place as every other website. They want their story easily readable in the center.

There's still plenty of variation, but sites with similar goals are going to end up with a lot of similar elements.

What exactly is the benefit to making things different other than satisfying some designer's need to be "creative"? It's helpful if you can expect login buttons to be in roughly the same place every time, navigation elements to be arranged the same way and point to the same types of places - Home/Products/Support/About/Jobs.

Being different for the sake of being different just wastes people's time trying to find stuff that isn't where they expect it to be.

Lack of innovation means lack of improvement. Endevoring to do things other than the rote way can lead to a better way.

> (Most) all websites should look the same.

Yes, modulo marketing concerns. Which obviously is something not regarded very highly on this forum :)

Of course, then the question should be why most websites settled on this particular style originally.

Because it flows naturally between mobile and desktop. Mobile first design is harder than most of us admit, and mobile first that looks good is even harder.

It's probably dictated to some degree by some aspect of culture. When you visit the websites where another culture dominates, one might find things to be different from what we're used to but similar to others where that other culture dominates the design.

A very good point I think, the web in your language is not always the same as the web in other languages, for example sites like nicovideo.js do tend to be different and carry a lot more information per page than American or European sites.

nicovideo.jp, I assume?

An easy mistake to make as s and p are right next to one-another on the qwerty um ... I might not be paying attention.

I agree. It's achieving 'dominant design' and a sign of maturation. Once, there were many designs (many car startups too) for a car steering wheel. At some point, they converged on the idea of a round gizmo, because it balanced utility and design, form and function... And lucky for us, designers moved onto other things.

This makes a lot of sense. To address a comment or two: It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that 21echoes' proposal includes the concept that websites of a similar nature should resemble each other rather than that all websites should look alike.

That would be true if every website had the same job. They don't. Some are there to inform the user, some to persuade the user, some to gather information, some to work as a shopfront and others to work as a product in themselves. It would be a very odd design quirk if one design worked best for all those things.

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