The Downfall of ‘What You See’ Web Design
The Gist
- Retro revival. Nostalgic technology, like “dumb phones,” is becoming popular again, influencing modern design.
- Consistency crisis. WYSIWYG’s challenges in scalable environments highlight the need for more robust content management systems.
- Training transition. As WYSIWYG struggles, companies must invest in employee training on new structured authoring tools.
Keeping up with technology requires constant effort, so it’s not surprising that some people get nostalgic about the “simpler times” of older technologies.
Retro tech is now in fashion. We see rekindled enthusiasm for “dumb phones” and old-school video games.
This nostalgia extends to another iconic technology of the late 20th century: WYSIWYG. Let’s examine some of the WYSIWYG challenges.
WYSIWYG: In Case You Don’t Know…
WYSIWYG, the notion that What You See Is What You Get, became popular in the 1980s when Steve Jobs promised computer users they could do their own thing. By the arrival of Windows 95, WYSIWYG became the default for office docs and slides. Before long, it became the preferred approach to creating web pages, too. CMSs included “page builders” that authors could use to design their own pages.
Over time, the downsides of WYSIWYG challenges started piling up. Every web page was different. Customers were confused. Employees didn’t know what their colleagues had published. Keeping thousands of idiosyncratic web pages up-to-date became a nightmare. Allowing each employee to do their own thing wasn’t working.
When individuals create web one-off pages, each page becomes an isolated dead end. After the page is published, it’s hard to reuse or fine-tune the page’s details. WYSIWYG doesn’t scale.
Brands watched their web properties grow like weeds. More than ever, they needed to coordinate their online customer relationships at scale, communicate online everywhere and unify the customer’s experience.
To tame the chaos, they strove to improve their content and UX processes to support consistency, repeatability, learning and improvement. They implemented style guides, design systems, content models, reusable modular content and journey planning.
Content and designs now must support multiple customer segments across numerous channels. Screens are increasingly composed of many discrete text modules and UI widgets that are used in many places.
The appeal of WYSIWYG waned once brands realized that what an author saw wasn’t necessarily what the customer got. A headline an individual edits or a UI widget they want to restyle may appear in several places. Changing these modular elements using a WYSIWYG editor can generate unintended consequences.
While brands improved their customer experience, some employees felt left behind. They weren’t trained on how to use new systems and found their usability poor. Initiatives that made the customer experience easier seemed to make their work harder. Some employees opted to do their own thing by embracing no-code products that freed them from IT and UX teams.
As users complained, vendors rallied to keep them on their platforms, resurrecting WYSIWYG (often rebranded as “visual builders,” “universal editors” or “visual editing”) as the answer to employee discontent. They promised these editors would simplify the development of the customer experience without burdening IT staff.
Related Article: Goodbye WYSIWYG for Web Content Management Systems?
WYSIWYG Challenges: The Core Problem
Yet the core problem remains: WYSIWYG doesn’t scale. It can’t build content and experiences that need to adapt and evolve.
Expecting individuals to fend for themselves and make their own decisions indicates that essential standards and processes are missing. While adequate for one-off content with a short shelf life, WYSIWYG challenges create a mess of content that needs to be updated frequently or reused in multiple contexts.
Business-critical content needs oversight. Organizations must lock down components to prevent changes from disrupting decisions elsewhere. They must develop rules and processes governing who can make changes, when and to what. Vendors haven’t built WYSIWYG tools that allow them to set these parameters.
Structured authoring tools offer more robust support for crafting and managing coherent experiences. These tools must be customized to the needs of employees, who need training on how to use new systems and processes. Vendors and integration partners can help, but ultimately, the brand needs to take the lead.
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