Tangential, and probably preaching to the choir here, but I really hate the modern web design trends.
I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.
I agree with the substance of what you say, but I wouldn't actually call it a design trend at all, rather it's a marketing trend, and I can tell you exactly where it comes from.
The reason behind it is a philosophy that you're not selling a product but rather a "solution". If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone explain it with the example "a customer isn't buying a drill, they're buying holes". The example apparently goes back to Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt, and it was popularized in the mid 2000's [1].
It was a legitimate observation around focusing on customer needs rather than your product line, and so what other products or services might you also be able to profitably provide? And in the tech world it turned into helpfully focusing on product-led "use cases" in UX design -- focusing on user flows of how to get things done, rather than individual features that a user can't figure out how to find or combine.
But then it got taken, in my opinion, waaay too far as marketing people started making websites that focus entirely on the "solution" and say next to nothing about the product. The site says "we'll fill all your hole needs!" and the customer is scratching their heads because they can't tell if this is a company that makes hole punches for 3-ring binders, or excavating equipment for your backyard, or drills.
And it's maddening. I share your pain.
Because it's not how consumers think. They think, I want a drill, and I have strong opinions as to whether I want corded or cordless, and to make sure it's compatible with the drill bits I already own. Consumers are generally pretty smart, and have already made the leap from "hole" to "drill".
So I understand where this "we sell hole solutions!" website pattern comes from, but I swear to god I don't understand why people are still doing it. The whole "it's holes not drills" philosophy has turned into a kind of cargo cult inside of a lot of companies, and it's not pretty.
So that's the genesis of it, but it's much worse: lazy, unprofessional marketing parrots.
80% of people in Marketing have no idea how to Market.
They just know how to 'do marketing things'.
This took me years to figure out, but there are actually few people who rigorously follow good, established marketing concepts, mostly they just 'make copy' 'make web sites' 'do campaigns' and efforts are often judged aesthetically, or by vanity metrics.
Also, we should admit, we've never had so much selection and perhaps most importantly, we've never lived among such abstract concepts.
You've never been confused at the 'Drill Maker' site. Even if they did talk about 'holes' - that would not matter.
Software is intangible, especially for 'newer' things.
But yes, it's unbelievably problematic, and deeply annoying.
Agency people are usually 'creative' - that's not what makes good marketing.
Rules of brand are: clarity, consistency, authenticity. While branding is only one part of it 'clarity' can be applied everywhere.
I'm looking at data.ai aka app annie right now and I want to wrangle he marketing team it's ridiculous to try to fathom what all their dumb products do - they only use abstractions.
Literally 5 products that 'increase ROI and help you meet OKRs' or whatever, my god man What the F is it, and what does it do? is the question at hand here.
Admittedly, it's not always so easy but focus should be on that.
I too share your pain here - BUT - I have another observation:
I think, and I hate that this is true, but I truly think larger enterprises - and specifically the people who make buying decisions within non-technical departments at larger enterprises - really do prefer to buy “solutions” and not tools.
I’m a product guy through and through and it drives me bonkers when I visit websites that try to sell me holes instead of drills. But I’ve worked with B2B SaaS companies, and when you’re selling to non-technical folks, they do seem to want to buy holes. This is particularly so with sales and sales enablement tools. You’ll get people proudly saying things like (to continue to metaphor) “you know I’m not an engineer so I don’t understand these fancy drills to yours. But I sure do like the holes you guys offer and they’ll make me look really good to our CEO”…
Omg yes!! I HATE this current design trend. It makes it EXTREMELY difficult to learn anything useful without, god forbid, talking to a sales rep, which is the absolute LAST thing I want to do in discovery. I automatically write off companies like this right out of the gate and move on. I assume that when I do talk to their sales people, they will paint a misleadingly rosy picture that doesn't match the reality of what we get after the contract is signed.
Humans use biases like how good something or someone looks. As well as other shortcuts and gut feeling. Engineer's biases are different from normal people though. For example a normal person would see someone good looking as competent, and if you don't understand it means that good looking guy is also very smart...
This is well into delusions of grandeur territory. “Engineers” are normal people. “Engineers” do all the same stuff that everyone else does. The only difference is that “engineers” bring some technical understanding to the table that might not otherwise be there, just as any other subject matter expert would. This subject matter expertise will bring varying degrees of value depending on the situation.
I hate this self-congratulatory take that people that write software are godly and unbreakably objective. Software people are just so typically introverted and insular that we have our own social signals that can just as easily be weaponised to have us buy stuff.
I think it's more a mindset than possession of technical knowledge.
I needed to buy some new cutlery. I knew nothing about cutlery, so I went and learned about steel grades, serration types, food service industry standards, etc. In the end, after a few weeks of on-and-off research, I ended up with an excellent WMF set. I told this story to a friend and she laughed, remarking that she would have just gone to the store to get some.
Our needs were the same, but I took a detail-oriented approach focusing on the product, whereas she focused on the solution. Both approaches are valid for our respective priorities, but I'd hazard that the types of people who become engineers (be it software or something else) are more likely to relate to stories like mine.
I don't even look at the product pages; I immediately look for the help or support section and start reading there, the documentation you find in those are much more indicative of the product and what it does.
They copy each other (and frankly, so do we). This style is their common idea of “professional image”. Since many companies have siloed off marketing, they have no real understanding of what’s going on in the rest of the company. At least, that’s how I see it.
If the website contains many sophisticated-looking things like animations etc. it makes many people think you must know a lot because you can come up with such a stylish and sophisticated web-site.
In other words it serves as part of the portfolio of your technological prowess. It does not really help the user of the web-site, it helps to fool them into thinking your product must be awesome. The web-site is part of the product, it's the box around the thing you sell.
Not to disagree, but I think what you might hate more than vapid, copy of a copy of a copy web design, is an industry so out of ideas that the aforementioned website is an accurate portrayal of it.
McMaster's marketing is done well before you type the address into the browser.
Their target custom is someone who needs to quickly get the item so they can go back to their job; make and price are not their concern -- to the extent that you can just email them and say "give me five more shelves" and their customer support people will look through your purchase history to match the model and paint scheme you bought. Or if you're a power plant, you can tell them to get the part to you RIGHT NOW, and they'll pay a courier to drive it from hundreds of miles away. (These are both true stories.)
McMaster's customer behavior is the dream of almost every industry out there.
The added value of this site for a non-native speaker of English is that we get to learn the proper words for the technical things you never know how to call.
It starts with a picture and then you get to the gory details.
> have a fluffy main page to inspire confidence in doing business with them.
Which, oddly perhaps, has the exact opposite effect on me. Another commenter mentioned McMaster-Carr's website. That one inspires confidence (because it exudes competence).
The fact that you are indeed preaching to the choir implies there are few sales people here, or at least none that will speak up. Because for any that I've worked around, they would all vocally defend exactly what you're talking about.
And oh my, the amount of times I've heard the "the more carousels the better, you can't have too many" arguments..
> where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I really dislike those, as the whole screen shudders as it tries to re-layout the presentation. It's especially bad when you're on a phone, and you're suddenly in a different place in the article.
> they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service
A lot of this is not deliberate. It's just incompetence. Writing good product descriptions for a website is really hard.
How do I know? I write copy for our website. Even though I'm an engineer it still tends to come out as fluff + engineering word salad. It takes multiple iterations to get it right. I have huge respect for people who can do this well.
I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.