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Hello! My name is Sam Goree and I'm going to be presenting our paper,
Investigating the Homogenization of Web Design: A Mixed Methods Approach
Over the past five years, a surprising number of web design blogs have posed the question,
"why do all websites look the same now?"
We decided to investigate this question empirically using computer vision,
by measuring how the visual homogeneity of the internet changed between 2003 and 2019
This is an important question: as HCI researchers,
we should be thinking about the factors which influence visual design
since it serves as a backdrop for everything else on the web
and has a strong effect on things like user experience.
For example, to study a contemporary trend like web brutalism
we need to understand the history to which it responds and why it makes sense.
This question is also a good opportunity for mixing quantitative and qualitative techniques.
The Internet Archive gives us a perfect opportunity to apply computational methods to this problem.
But these methods aren't perfect, so we should triangulate our findings through other methods like ethnography.
So what data should we use?
The internet is vast! There's over a billion websites!
Even a random sample, if we could construct it, might not represent the web as people see it
So instead, we make use of three selection strategies:
First we use websites of top companies from the Russell 1000
Second we use websites of the alexa top 500
Third we use webby award-nominated websites
These selection strategies are not perfect, they're biased towards the English-speaking web for example,
but they let us get different snapshots of change over time
The next question is, How should we measure similarity between websites?
We need something like this to measure homogeneity. We settled on two approaches:
First we use hand-tuned metrics for layout and color which are easy to interpret,
but had to be hand-designed for the task.
Second we use deep learning-based metrics which we learned automatically from data,
but are difficult to interpret as a result.
To triangulate further, though, we also conducted interviews with veteran web designers
to investigate how their tools and design processes have changed over the past fifteen years.
While all of our participants started in web design, their career paths diverged
and actually cover the gamut of jobs involved in the web today quite well.
What we found was that yes, websites do look more similar
The average distance between pages mostly increased over the first eight or nine years
but then decreased through until the present.
Layout distance declined the most, 44% between 2012 and 2019.
Because we used interpretable features, though, we can figure out why.
With respect to color, sites shifted from a variety of colored backgrounds
to mostly off-white backgrounds with other colors and images on top.
For layout, pages used to have a variety of dense column patterns,
but they're now mostly centered with lots of blank space
We also looked at the source code. While code overlap between pages has gone down, software library overlap has gone up.
This pattern occurs first in the websites from technology and consumer services companies,
and it correlates with another pattern: mobile support
But this could all just be a coincidence.
So we did a regression analysis to measure which libraries similar-looking sites tend to have in common.
We found that UI libraries which are often used for responsive web design
tend to predict for more similar layouts,
while others, as you can see, predict for less similar layouts
Our interview results contextualize these findings.
When asked about how their tools and processes have changed,
our participants referenced the rise of software libraries and highly technical tooling for the web.
The gradual adoption of CSS and javascript improved the web, doing away with earlier practices like table-based layouts,
but they made development more technically demanding.
Libraries help to remedy this problem: they manage complexity, increase mobile support and resilience,
and are helpful to achieve usability and accessiblity goals.
There were also changes in cultural constraints on web design
Mobile devices led to an increase in comfort with scrolling, which decreased the importance of "above the fold" design
Steve Jobs' 2007 Thoughts on Flash, where he announced Flash wouldn't be supported on the iPhone,
made interaction on the web converge on JavaScript.
Google's 2015 "Mobilegeddon" update, where they changed search rankings to prioritize sites with mobile support
forced holdout sites to shift to the new development paradigm.
Also, the design process has become important to business,
leading to long, drawn-out design negotiations.
As our participant said, "it takes a village to raise a website" now
So all of this talk of conformity leads to a question. Is it a good thing for the web?
We believe there are strong arguments on both sides.
On the one hand, popular libraries are better at adhering to accessibility standards.
Sites that use common interaction patterns are easier to use
and there are just fewer really awful web designs now than there used to be.
On the other hand, though, the Internet is a unique cultural artifact that anyone can contribute to
and as designers, we believe that form should communicate content:
the like, "tech startup" aesthetic just isn't right for every site
We're also concerned that big tech companies are the ones maintaining these libraries.
These companies seek to consolidate power over web infrastructure more generally,
which the Mozilla Foundation has labeled as bad for the "health" of the web.
We believe this consolidation may extend to design aesthetics as well.
Thank you!