Virtually every website nowadays follows a God-awful trend in UI that generally replaces hyperlinked text with illustration-heavy art work arranged in a grid layout, making it not easier but HARDER for people to find a specific page. You cannot search for text on the page as it’s all now pictures; and, each page shows less links as a picture takes up more real estate than simple text.
Microsoft has joined that trend, making it almost impossible to find MSDN subscription downloads (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads). (Thank goodness Google search still works.) When you set your browser to http://msdn.microsoft.com, you get a large page that is nice to look at but shows virtually nothing:
Now, where are the downloads for your MSDN subscription? Click on the “Downloads” tab, and you get three items you can navigate to, none of which help.
All the other menu items in the page are the same–no MSDN downloads. if you click on the “Subscriber portal” in the upper-right, then you get a page with a 6 by 3 grid of icons for various downloads, but none of which say are an OS, or the VS C++ Build Tools:
From The Next Web, “In 2017, websites are likely to start moving back to basics and placing more emphasis on content. Whether that means we remove all of the other distractions we’ve spent years adding, or just making them take up less real estate is yet to be determined. Getting back to the heart of a website — the content — will be prevalent moving forward.” I certainly hope so. Maybe someone could define a measure that identifies when simple text is more appropriate than a grid of illustrations?
Please, let’s go back to the future and just use text where it’s appropriate!
