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.

Call it what you want, its a splash page Maybe I'll be done with the scroll before the next harvest

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.

I do love me some Android This should be shown on a billboard in Times Square

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.