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Are Splash Screens Back?

06 Jan 2014

I thought the internet as a whole gave up on these back in 2007. The magic landing page that tells your visitors you’ve arrived some where great but need to make a decision to continue you on with your adventure by clicking through. It didn’t take long for site owners and usability experts to realize people hated them [1] and often lost visitors because of them.

Even with the entire population of the internet in agreement I find myself running into these ‘landing’ pages more often these days.

A massive full screen image with a subject line or sales intro/pitch that needs to be scrolled through to get to any interesting content. The only difference between this and 2007 is a user does not need to click through to content but instead has to scroll for what feels like a country mile to proceed. Do people find these types of sites appealing aside from the U/X designer? Scrolling is already a somewhat broken feature in today’s tablet/smartphone ecosystem, I think these layouts make the user experience worse. Even Google choose this type of format to market their Android 4.4 KitKat release.

It should be stated I’m not picking on Evgeny Tchebotarev or his blog specifically, I have come across this web layout trend enough times over the past few months I decided to write about it. Layouts like these are distracting, cumbersome and destroy the natural flow of reading a webpage, the technical aspects of it is extremely cool, in terms of usability it makes my teeth itch. I’m a little surprised the internet decided to return to its jean jacket roots.