Oh yeah. User-agent stylesheets and a list of links. The pinnacle of human-centered design. /s The author either doesn't understand design or has a very low-bar for tactically good user-centered experiences, or both.
I can list an endless list of bad things on this website:
- Bad information architecture.
- Poor contextualization, narrative, and direction of a message (just because it's Berkshire Hathaway, doesn't mean that I automatically know what I'm trying to find in their website)
- Poor document structure that renders at the whole width of wide screens and doesn't wrap for small screens.
- Bad typography and typographic scale (can a visually impaired person read the small text that shows dates and footnotes?)
- Bad use of color. Everything is blue, the links are purple. Usually in plain stylesheets blue is reserved for links and purple for clicked links.
- External links don't open in a new tab.
- No branding. Can a user trust that this is an official website?
- No navigational elements (navbar, breadcrumbs, etc) that allow a user to return to the main page (which is supposed to be the "master class of human-centered design). Every click is a dead-end.
- Multiple SEO and accessibility issues:
- Does not have a <meta name="viewport"> tag with width or
initial-scaleNo `<meta name="viewport">` tag found. Document
does not have a meta description
- Text is illegible because there's no viewport meta tag
optimized for mobile screens.
- Tap targets are too small because there's no viewport meta
tag optimized for mobile screens
- The page does not contain a heading, skip link, or
landmark region
> No navigational elements (navbar, breadcrumbs, etc) that allow a user to return to the main page (which is supposed to be the "master class of human-centered design). Every click is a dead-end.
This is the web, it works like people expect web pages to work. No custom behaviors, links work like links, the back button does what the back button should. That is absolutely human friendly. If external links were supposed to open on a new page then the browsers would default to that.
> Multiple SEO and accessibility issues
Whether a site has SEO issues is irrelevant to usability of the site. It's not like they are looking for organic traffic. If I'm looking for BRK's homepage, it's easy enough to find which is all that matters from a SEO perspective for a site like this.
The accessibility issues are a concern if they actually existed. This kind of site is ideal for screen readers and while it doesn't automatically adjust for mobile, it doesn't get in the way of zoom or reader view which makes the site just fine for people who struggle with small fonts.
> The page does not contain a heading, skip link, or landmark region
You don't seem to understand why the skip links are there. In this case, there is no heading full of links you need to skip over, if you open the page and start tabbing, you are already on the first bit of content. It is better from a usability perspective than a skip link.
You shouldnt conflate browser defaults with good usability.
Sure its generally speaking a good rule of thumb to follow but saying the default is the right thing to do because its a default is a logical fallacy. Its appealing to authority for no actual reason.
Why is the default the default? Is it because of user studies or is it because a developer said thats the easiest thing to implement in the time i have available.
I think the high-bar that you desire is less user friendly and more designer-job-friendly.
- Here the information you're probably after is right at the top: letters from the CEO, and annual statements. If you're visiting the site you probably know what you're after.
- Websites optimised for mobile usually wrap text and remove zooming because the designer is perfect at deciding at what size the text looks prettiest, and doesn't want the user to spoil this. This is the worst thing that's happened to web design, probably ever. It's worse than IE6 at it's ugliest.
- I am not visually impaired, so can't comment on this.
- Links are underlined consistently making it clear what is a link.
- I can middle click, or open in new tab. I don't want new tabs popping up just because the designer wants me to stay on their site.
- Does branding ever help this? They have the .com, why would a pretty logo make things safer? They're quite easy to screenshot.
I agree that a link back to the homepage would be useful.
Overall a return to information dense websites like this one would be a wonderful thing.
Berkshire Hathaway has highly visible brands like Berkshire Hathaway Home Services (https://www.bhhs.com/) and Berkshire Hathaway Energy (https://www.brkenergy.com/. You see their brands very frequently on yard signs and advertisements.
Many people can land on this website first. Not everyone is looking for the CEO letters and annual statements. That's basically assuming that anyone who interacts with BH has to be an investor which is definitely not the case.
You could do something as simple as making the links blue instead of purple and it would already be an infinitely better design because people assume purple links have been visited.
I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.
Although there are also a fair number of academics who invest more effort in web design than I do, this type of design is fairly common in math. I haven't heard anyone within the field criticize it as "bad" or "lazy".
My students are part of the audience, but not all.
For example, if I give a talk at a conference, then someone who was in the audience might plausibly look up my website to get a sense of my research interests.
For some reason I have always seen academic websites like yours as a different concept. Most academic websites look like yours and I think that’s fine.
I was thinking more of something like a CMS control panel or some data-entry tool, or a consumer website like an e-commerce.
> I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.
Yeah that was a profoundly underwhelming article, especially for an "expert". You would think Maria and Matt would set a higher standard for contributors.
It's an interesting idea, and I totally agree with it, but the article seems like a long shower thought. I'd love to see more evidence that a list of links is actually the right solution for Berkshire Hathaway customers. I bet it is, but the author is making a big assumption that what exists works for their customers because Berkshire Hathaway is successful.
Some of what you're describing is very important for users, like accessibilities issues, but not every general solution makes sense for every audience. That's the essence of user-centered design: a ruthless focus on optimizing for particular customer needs. You're not wrong that the site could use an information hierarchy pass—items like "A Message From Warren E. Buffett" are clearly more important than "Berkshire Activewear," for example—but when you're designing for an audience that knows exactly what they want, the best job you can do is to get them there with no frills. Real design is about solving problems for users, and an ugly list of links can do that if the links are right for that user base. In fact, I'd hope the designer spent the bulk of their time figuring out exactly what the right links are. That's 80% of the solution in this case. Better visual hierarchy, better typography and color, navigational elements to help users go back or discover different aspects of the site–the rest are accessories to the design.
So, you're not wrong in your design criticism, but it's important to know what decisions will make the most impact for the users you're designing for and which are less important. For Berkshire Hathaway's target customer, this website may actually meet their needs perfectly fine.
Edit: One note: the author of this article does NOT provide any evidence that this solution actually is the right one for that customer base. I wish they did, because I suspect it's actually pretty close to what will do the best job for their users, but the author assumes it's right based primarily on Berkshire Hathaway's success.
> - Poor document structure that renders at the whole width of wide screens ...
Does everyone just use their browser full screen now? I never want super-wide text, but I can always narrow my browser window or switch to portrait mode if I'm using a phone or tablet.
I just checked hn, and it lets text get too wide to comfortably read, but stops somewhere before full screen width.
The claim made in the article is that ignoring UX and SEO conventions tells you all about the company. That is the “human centered” message behind the site design.
A website with a bunch of responsive elements, meta tags, and fonts spent a lot of time thinking about how they are going to convert clicks.
I believe that "Master class" is taking it a bit too far. The site has remained the same because there is no reason to update it. If the simplistic design was revolutionary or represented something other than "Don't fix what is not broken" they would be using the same format for their portfolio companies.
The site gets the info out to the people that need it, nothing more nothing less. It's a good design for what they are trying to do however it's a terrible design for many other companies.
I agree Master Class is too much[1], but it's still better than most sites I deal with today: the information is easy to find, doesn't overload your browser, and plays nice with extensions. Plus, it's usable on mobile. Not optimized, sure, but at least it doesn't break my ability to use it on mobile: I can just zoom in as necessary.
But that's more of an indictment of out-of-control web design that's all too common.
[1] I think the author could plausibly mean "class" in the sense of "lesson", since he contrasts it with the other, newer site design and uses them to illustrate the difference purposes, but a) that's a bit of a stretch, and b) he never frames it as a lesson or uses the word "class" for the rest of the article.
The simplistic design is how websites used to be before designers felt the need to justify their existence. This has more in common with a gopher terminal than modern sites. Berkshire shareholders in particular already know why they're on the site. You can't buy a single share without a bucketload of cash. The performance of the company sells itself.
Most modern websites just obfuscate information, but they still all just follow the leader with where they put information. Say you want to contact someone for customer support and you're on the homepage. Where do you go? To search the page footer for that information, of course.
What would the author say about Shazam? Is it a master class that Shazam is one button you press and hold it up to a speaker? It’s the only possible form Shazam could take. Choosing the obvious form in a design exercises where the choices are already narrowed down for you isn’t really a profound example of simplifying a complex idea.
The Mac OS dock might be a real master class, the Windows start bar (for it’s time, to some degree, before it get’s overwhelmed).
It seems this article is idolizing the ugliness of the site as being some some kind of contrarian user-centered design. User-centered doesn't have to mean ugly, though. There's a whole lot of middle ground between "default-styled page from 1995" and "2020 SaaS landing page with flashy illustrations that doesn't explain what it does".
Not only that. Aesthetics are a function of design. They allow us to understand a message, follow a narrative and more deeply empathize with objects to the point that we may be forgiving of small issues.
They are part of how we behave and interact with many things that surround us and influence us. They help us to create mental models for the world because they become an attribute of the objects we desire or loathe.
Of course, utilitarian and plain boring design aesthetics have a place in the world, but imagine if everything was like this website. It would be almost impossible to generate opinions because we don't have any distinct reference to help us imagine if something could be more harmonic and visually appealing.
I believe that the goal of aesthetics is precisely to empower people to generate feelings toward objects that otherwise wouldn't generate a connection. It's the same reason why we can appreciate art or admire nature. Because those things are full of visual attributes that help us to elicit thoughts and re-describe things as we see them (ugly, funny, colorful, boring, etc).
Agreed. It's kind of distracting because, when you read it, you start thinking, "is that right?" My immediate thought was to go look up with Mosaic came out and determine if there were graphical browsers before that, which, I think, is not what the author intended.
I have that problem generally, where I will automatically think of plausible interpretations of what someone is saying (like, here, imagining that early graphical browsers e.g. for minitel looked like this), and thus often can't tell if someone is joking.
"graphical browser" is anachronistic, but there were certainly graphical interfaces for online services before the web was a thing. I wasn't using them until the early 90s, but someone must have, in the 80s.
The Berkshire Hathaway sure can look like that precisely because it’s the website of Berkshire Hathaway, an established and trusted holding company - pretty much the hallmark of blue chip investment.
Furthermore, Berkshire does not try to entice visitors or market any services through its website. Its only purpose is shareholder communication, and for that, this website is one step removed from sending those by fax.
> The Berkshire Hathaway sure can look like that precisely because it’s the website of Berkshire Hathaway, an established and trusted holding company - pretty much the hallmark of blue chip investment.
> Furthermore, Berkshire does not try to entice visitors or market any services through its website. Its only purpose is shareholder communication, and for that, this website is one step removed from sending those by fax.
That's exactly what the post says:
> The official website is built for the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. It’s not built to convert customers. It’s not built for you or me. Shareholders are really only concerned with very specific things: news releases, reports and letters from Warren Buffett to name a few.
Yes, but even those functions could be filled by something which doesn’t look like a printout of 1994 lynx session. It’s a statement. It’s unfashionably fashionable.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of the reasons the site has remained this way is that people do fax this site to shareholders (exactly as is without transforming it using css or as a printed document). In some cases that's a requirement.
Also, Berkshire Hathaway is a master at PR, and the "aw shucks" authenticity of Warren Buffet is a centerpiece of it.
Warren Buffet still appeals to Middle Americans even though his company has been at the heart of just about everything that went wrong in finance and business in the 2010s.
For instance, they bought a number of food-related brands such as Kraft, made changes that damaged the taste of the products, and seemed blindsided when sales fell. They replaced the cheese in Kraft Mac and Cheese with Milk Protein Concentrate from China, which hurt the sensory qualities of the product dramatically. Within a few years, most store brands had made the change to keep up.
Later on I saw Kraft MC ads all over NYC asking you to remember how much you liked it when you were small that don't tell you that it tastes much worse than it did then. They'll sell you a box, sure, but then you'll spit it out and never buy it again.
Jim Cramer has talked about the decline of big food brands on his show many times, but he doesn't say Warren Buffet or Berkshire Hathaway has anything to do with it because he can do no wrong in the eyes of media companies that are swimming in Geico ad cash.
Similarly, CNBC sends Becky Quick out to Omaha as often as they can. The oldsters in the audience really likes Warren Buffet and Warren Buffet thinks Becky Quick is a babe (I sure do) and leers at her more and more as dementia claims his mind. It is in plain view but doesn't get talked about because the media can't get enough of that Gecko.
When I read an article like that I don't think the author got paid off, it's just they see that all the respectable people act as if they'd been paid off so you can look respectable by acting as if you were paid off too. It's like those fake influencers who can't get paid but pretend they do because maybe someday they will be.
Geico is most important company in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio, and is wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
The insurance business is Berkshire's primary business, and all the cash generated from premiums (the float), which is just theirs to do with what they please until claims come in, is what has allowed it to invest and buy other businesses.
The quality of the site is not coming from the quality of web design (it's not that good).
It's the purity of the function that leads to good design. The function is to provide information for stock owners and potential investors, many of them are old people. The site is not trying to sell, influence or impress. Berkshire is selling nothing to consumers or visitors. Their subsidiaries that sell have their own websites.
Berkshire HQ has just 25 staffers. Their subsidiaries employ close to 400,000 people.
Option B serves the user with relevant information too fast. That might be nice for the user, but for SEO, it is horrible, since Google incentives building websites that suck users in and never let them go (by incorporating time spent on the page into their ranking).
"[Tim Berners-Lee] wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and then to the general public in August 1991."
I guess the eighties have become a frame of mind rather than a period in time.
Renaissance Technologies - one of the "most secretive and successful" hedge funds in the world has a pretty bare bones site too
https://www.rentec.com/
Because they dont need anything else on their website, because the people that invest in their fund dont find them through a website. You dont get to decide to invest in funds like those, they get to pick whose money they accept, they dont even necessarily need a website
The poor mobile support is pretty unforgivable. I do really like old-fashioned websites such as Craigslist or very straightforward blogs such as Paul Graham's. But this particular example does have a lot of usability problems.
You'd think that site would be accessible. And while it's not terrible, all the unordered lists with a single list item in them is crazy annoying if you're using a screen reader.
Error 1020 Ray ID: 583eb7e1fa8bda42 • 2020-04-14 16:14:10 UTC
Access denied
What happened?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.
I don't understand why so many upvotes. While the underlying concept of the article is correct, and the author deserves credit for that, the argument made to support it can be true only if the reader accepts the premise of the article itself (option B is made having the user at the center), which the author openly admits he/she has no clue if that is the case.
>This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.
So being HNed is now considered as DDoS? Last time I checked an article on HN Front page got me about 30K in a day, even if that happened to be all within the one minute, how could that be classified as DDoS?
One more aspect of why this design is appropriate is consistency. The 1998 version found in the wayback machine is basically the same design. Given the product the consistency is especially appreciated.
You have to pick colors and typefaces, why not pick good ones? There are probably millions of choices that are both beautiful and functional.
The author seems to believe that there's an essential zero-sum relationship between form and functionality, i.e. by removing "bells and whistles", you've somehow improved the finding of information. That doesn't make sense to me.
It's not just that, it's also notoriety and reputation. No one is going to that site to learn what BH is and what it has to offer. They don't care about any SEO beyond people searching "Berkshire Hathaway". They're not a B2C brand. They are not converting sales. They are not creating Brand Halo. It's basically just their federally-mandated SEC filings.
isn't that the point the author is making? they're suggesting that a website that most average internet folks would say is terrible/ugly/bad/etc is actually nearly perfect when looking through the lens of "who does this website serve".
it feels a bit naive to shrug this off as "elite wealthy people getting their ego boosted". where are the articles praising Jeff Bezos' "expeditions" website[0], or Bill Gates' personal blog[1]?
But check out the page's source. The site isn't so much a "master class in design" as it is a page that was made in the 90's and has never been updated. Back then this was how almost every webpage looked. It's still using tables for layout. Based on the MSHTML generator tag, it was most likely made in MS FrontPage.
The part of the site I interact with most often, edgar (https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml), does not look like it was made in the 90s at all. And the other parts of government services I interact with (SBIR stuff, like SAM registration and all), are worse, but even they are rolling out new versions of things (e.g. fastlane) that are better.
And looking at sec.gov right now looks nothing like a 90s website. It has clean graphics, its responsive, etc. Not exactly sure how it looks like it hasn't been updated from the 90s.
It's hardly a masterclass though, and it wasn't designed that way because Warren Buffet carefully thought about it and decided this was the best way to do it. He just decided to put effectively 0 effort into the website and ended up with a basic HTML file that perhaps wasn't all that out of place in 1990.
Perhaps that is the masterclass: not wasting time and effort where it isn’t needed. I have seen that pattern in successful people, focusing on the right things and knowing what to ignore.
Disclaimer: I’m a yak shaver, I’ll waste immense time on “perfecting“ something irrelevant.
Exactly. Pretty sure however berkshirehathaway.com is deigned builtin.com will find genius in it.
Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of unadorned personal websites (including that of yours truly), especially in academic circles, or websites of old-school software projects look just like this masterpiece.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Do you expect builtin to find your personal site for this writeup? Does your site have the same purpose and is it being consumed the same way as BH? Can builtin know that your site design is effectively for the consumers that visit the site?
Whereas with BH, they can be sure that this page gets used as BH has a wide net of consumers that'd need to leverage this site. If this design was a major blocked to business effectivity, BH has enough money to change it. The fact that they haven't suggests it's at least good enough.
What I’m saying is this is just the boring old way of writing websites and it’s still widely practiced today, there’s hardly any genius in it, nor is it a masterpiece.
Also, your argument that any company with enough money to fix a dysfunctional website must have a good enough website is kinda laughable.
This is for shareholders etc. Suppose you give that page + the berkshire page to a group of shareholders. I’d bet they can find what they need faster on berkshire’s site. And it loads damned fast. Scotia’s is bloated.
Moreover, Berkshire shareholders are wealthy. Berkshire has a large portfolio, but Geico is the one product pretty much all of them need (car insurance). There’s a highly visible geico add with a clear call to action right on the home page. That’s no accident (Buffett also mentions it constantly at shareholder meetings and in his popular letters)
I genuinely think the Berkshire site is better suited for its purpose than 95% of corporate relations pages.
I see a different lesson, perhaps not one that is very kind: content always beats form. Visual bells and whistles don't provide anything if relevant content is not also present. Those bells and whistles might even be an impediment to getting to the information, which means it's sometimes best left out.
I'm obviously biased in this interpretation, because I tend to favour low-bandwidth version of websites as much as I can, such as using the no-javascript version of facebook (m.facebook.com) where there is much less actual interaction than facebook wants, or using an alternate twitter client (nitter.net) because I just want to read the content, not wait for javascript to load and execute if I'm not even going to interact. Just look at Hacker News: isn't that supposed to be laughable in 2020's web design world ? And yet we're all using it because, beyond being centered on content, it's _fast_
The side effect of aiming for no javascript is that the content is more easily reachable: there's no need to wander into endless menus and animations that bring no value, because everything is there already. I feel it's a lesson that more designers should apply.
Is there any necessary connection between visual roughness or a "90s look" and low bandwidth or speed? Seems to me you can have a lot of javascript and CSS in a few KB, and what bogs down modern web pages has to be frameworks and advertising. Although I'm not and never have been a web dev.
For sure you can have a slick website with javascript and CSS that doesn't slow down the page because of all the tricks like loading/caching/prerending/whatever magic is available. But that's the thing: it requires work, which means you have to be very good at it, or select the correct tools to do it and depend on them; in the case of companies website, you most likely are pressured to cram yet another feature that is extremely urgent yet there's no budget for making the site fast. Sometimes developers don't even care because it's fast enough to them. Some other times they do care, and they come up with excellent initiatives like 2G Tuesdays (https://engineering.fb.com/networking-traffic/building-for-e...)
So yeah, doing a 90s' style website is not necessary to have a fast website, but it's impossible to have a slow website. But it's true that a very minimum amount of CSS can totally change the look of your site without being bloated: see for example the Best Motherfucking Website (https://bestmotherfucking.website/)
Basically the lesson is, if you’re providing a valuable service to your users, it doesn’t matter how your website looks.
If users leave your site because of how it looks, then you’re not serving them. If users go to your site in spite of not looking terribly good, then you’re providing a valuable service (and that service is not “web design”).
Craiglist absolutely gets praised because they have been so successful with that design. There are plenty of websites that looked like Craigslist but were not as successful, and you won't see them in thought leadership blog posts in 2020.
Also, Craiglist has evolved their site quite a bit and at this point their "design" is no longer a matter of simplicity, but essentially a visual aesthetic that they maintain as a matter of branding and culture, kind of like Amazon giving people door-desks long after it became cheaper for them to just buy regular office furniture in bulk.
Plus, Craigslist couldn't just change their design to something "modern", it'd put people off - people don't like change. Or, people don't like sudden change.
It reminds me of a national adverts website over here, Marktplaats; it used to be a very 90's, table-driven lists of links kind of deal with a fugly brown background. But it took off nevertheless, and became a major business that was eventually taken over by Ebay (in 2004). It's very slowly changed its front-end to a more modern facing one. But they made sure to do it slowly. Evolution rather than revolution.
But I still think the post you're responding to is too cynical (shocking on HN, I know). One author on one website praised Berkshire Hathaway's website. So what? Plenty of people on plenty of other websites praise mediocre things created by non-rich people all the time.
Craig Newmark is a billionaire, granted not on the same level as Warren Buffett, but having your "not rich at all" threshold between those two seems not that useful.
Out of curiosity, what do people think the social version of this?
I've noticed that certain people can say nearly anything and people will gush all over it, even when it's clearly foolish or someone else said the same thing just 10 minutes previous.
Essentially any extremely wealthy person can pontificate on a topic and be taken seriously, even if they have zero background in the topic and their opinion is easily dismissed by those with knowledge of the field.
That's what happens when you make financial success equivalent to wisdom.
I generally find that just about every "What Worked For Me" success essay gets praise and careful parsing. We seem to think that success is a product of either being or doing the right type of thing rather than luck. We seem to think advice is universal enough to apply to everyone rather than being highly contingent. I am suspicious of both.
If you want to criticize an essay/oppinion to make a point, just refer to it by name and state why you think it supports the argument you're trying to make
That's not always necessary, and it's a good way to get dragged down into quibbling. The GP rings true to me, even though I'm not sure precisely which of the PG essays they most had in mind.
This was just a little swipe, I didn’t intend to go deep into it, and actually planned to delete the comment after a few minutes. Of course that plan was foiled by your reply.
As an example, PG's "submarine" essay gets cited here all the time as amazing insightful when all it does is talk about basic concepts of PR, an industry that is hundreds of years old.
I second that. Apparently a website that doesnt even bother to be responsive for mobile is a masterclass of design. It's a few links and a geico ad. They clearly dont care about the website. The article mentions that they cant read the minds of the berkshire hathaway website design team to understand their intentions. Do they really think berkshire Hathaway has a design team for this? It's not "designed for shareholders" - shareholders use smartphones to check in on their investments too! Compare this with the website for berkshire Hathaway's three service and see what berkshire can do when they actually care about designing a site:
I can list an endless list of bad things on this website:
- Bad information architecture.
- Poor contextualization, narrative, and direction of a message (just because it's Berkshire Hathaway, doesn't mean that I automatically know what I'm trying to find in their website)
- Poor document structure that renders at the whole width of wide screens and doesn't wrap for small screens.
- Bad typography and typographic scale (can a visually impaired person read the small text that shows dates and footnotes?)
- Bad use of color. Everything is blue, the links are purple. Usually in plain stylesheets blue is reserved for links and purple for clicked links.
- External links don't open in a new tab.
- No branding. Can a user trust that this is an official website?
- No navigational elements (navbar, breadcrumbs, etc) that allow a user to return to the main page (which is supposed to be the "master class of human-centered design). Every click is a dead-end.
- Multiple SEO and accessibility issues: