The Worst Feature of Web Design is Inescapable

Just let me read the words

This is an unscheduled interruption of the usual dispatches that make up this newsletter to rant about something that has been bothering me for years. In my defense, it’s relevant to our purpose of collecting interesting things to read online, given that it deals with how text appears on websites.

The greatest obstacle to reading something on the internet (other than paywalls, which are a different matter) is these things:

I don’t really know what they’re called. The panel things at either the top or the bottom or both that identify the site you already know you’re on. They sometimes contain subscription information, but they stay after you subscribe. They hang over the page you’re reading, obstructing a fraction of an inch of it. They are so ubiquitous it seems like a deeper imperative than any individual design decision.

Why is this a problem? Let’s say you’re reading something—for example, this randomly selected story at The New Yorker. You’ve gotten to the last line here:

Like most of us, you may prefer to treat written text as a series of discrete pages rather than an endless scroll. (This is why books remain a widely used technology.) You press spacebar or page down to get to the next part, which is what I did to capture these images. That brings you here:

Huh? Instagram announced that it would think of my body? That doesn’t seem right. Did I forget something? Was I abducted by aliens? Let me scroll back.

What did I miss? Five lines. The presence of the overhanging panels eliminated five full lines of text. The total varies, but even when it eliminates just one line, it’s enough to garble the content. And it always eliminates at least one line.

I’m not singling out the above publications; everyone has these. It bears repeating: if I’m reading your website, I know I’m there. I don’t need to be reminded every few paragraphs, certainly not at the expense of reading those paragraphs. This is a sign—a minor one, but a sign all the same—of a value system, one in which the writing a publication contains is of lesser value. That’s the reality of this industry, I guess, but it’s a bit rude to constantly remind the reader.

Could I avoid this by scrolling? I don’t want to, but yeah, I could. Is it a major problem in today’s world? Not really, but nothing is when you play that game. Is it literally everywhere, and does it serve no purpose, and does it piss me off? Yes, yes, and yes. No one asked me and no one ever will, but I would like to make these illegal. Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.