Common Website Design Mistakes of the 90s

Common Website Design Mistakes of the 90s

In the 90s, people who built websites weren't concerned about the user experience. If the site looked cool, it was enough. People were not walking around with smartphones so responsiveness was not an issue. The top 90s UX fails include:

Horrid Backgrounds

While hideous backgrounds are technically a design issue, they impact how a visitor navigates through a site. In the 90s, we saw cloud backgrounds, backgrounds with repeating text and other horrors. Not only did they make the content hard to read, the backgrounds would obscure the menu so visitors had to search for additional pages.

Scrolling Marquees

These were popular in the 90s. Web designers loved them, but visitors would get distracted by seeing movement in their peripheral vision. It made it difficult to concentrate on the text.

Opening Pages in New Windows

Web developers were afraid of losing visitors to another page on their site so they had pages open in new windows. Visitors couldn’t use the back button if they had the screen maximized, and screens were small then. People rarely realized a new window opened.

Pop Ups

There small windows of advertising which popped up in the foreground of a page were extremely annoying. Hopefully, we've learned that annoying visitors does not work. Today, people are quick to install an ad blocker when they see pop ups and publishers lose ad revenue.

Tiny Fonts

For some unknown reason, tiny fonts were popular in the 90s and the change font size was disabled. Today, 16px is common, but back then 10px was standard. It was next to impossible for people over age 40 to read web pages. Web designers figured the only Internet users were young people with good eyesight.

The 90s websites were full of violated expectations. Web designers should understand giving visitors what they expect is the key to good UX design. For more information click here https://uxdesign.cc/what-ux-from-1989-can-teach-us-22476ac5703c.

Mistakes Web Design 90s