THE USER EXPERIENCE OF MOST ARTIST WEBSITES

is awful.

There’s something wrong with the attitude behind the extreme unusableness of their stylistic vices. I even suspect it’s not as much a matter of mistaken web design trends than an undercurrent of arrogance and an implicit view of the role of the artist and its pleading admirers. And I’m not in the mood to be understanding of that, so I’ll be unusually more hostile and imbecile than the first time I attempted to FIX the Internet with Usability!, back in “Please standardize Prev/Next nav links order”.

USABILITY. GALLERIES. Pics. Arrogance. Let’s go!

1. DON’T MAKE US CLICK in order to see if something may be interesting. Each unneeded click is an annoyance. Each unneeded click is you wanting me annoyed for being interested in your work.

1.1. THUMBNAILS. Not detail minipics. we want to know what we’re clicking, before we click it.

ADDENDUM: PICS, dude. WTH are you doing using text or BLOODY NUMBERS to blindly link images? Why don’t you also comicsans that in Flash, and rickrοll a bit, or Goαtse, or 2G1C? Surprise, surprise!!

1.2 SCROLL IS OUR FRIEND. Scrolling is easy, clicking next is not.

- Thumbnails: LET US SEE THE WHOLE GALLERY AT A GLANCE. Don’t paginate, unless there’s +100 thumbs.

- Medium / Full pics: NO NEXT NEXT NEXT. Put one beneath the other, and let us scroll while it’s loading. If any Next is needed, make it big enough (CSS padding, etc.).

1.3 THE PROBLEM WITH DATES. Why would I click June 08 and not March 07? How do I know a month is interesting or not, except by clicking them, time after time, until I BORE and exit the page in frustration? Monthly archives would be useful if the date said anything at all about the nature of its content, instead of being mere accessory metadata. Archive by content (theme, media), use metadata only for that kind of specialized searches.

2. DON’T BE ANAL. This is 2009. Content is to be shared. Old dumb copyright is ridicule and loathable.

2.1. DIGITAL PICS ARE TO BE SAVED. Don´t annoy us with right click blocks. We can read the source code, We can even decompile SWFs. You don’t lose anything if we have the pic in our computers, it absolutely DOES NOT matter. On the other hand, you’ll lose us if you annoy us.

2.2. GOOD THINGS ARE TO BE SHARED. And perversely, not being shared means it’s not a good thing. Ffffound! is the new status quo, founddding things is the way to be. Thou shall not ask us to delete things, thou shall not send a DMCA request, unless you want to make a prick dumb bad person of yourself.

3. FLASH IS ONLY FOR AWESOMENESS. The Requiem for a Dream website, that kind of thing. We don´t need that for a perfectly CSS-able basic gallery. We don’t need Flash hiding your content, and distorting our browsing mental models. This is the lesser of these rules.

I think that might be all. Excuse my uncharacteristic cockiness, I’m sleeping very badly.