Abstract
Brutalist websites are a contemporary trend that uses anti-aesthetic interface elements to create a high-impact visual product. Since the web is a communications product, this research sought to understand if the aesthetics of Brutalist sites overshadow their usability, defined as the ability of a user to effortlessly navigate through the contents of a digital interface to achieve a goal or retrieve information.
Triangulation was applied to obtain a solid understanding of the problem. Consequently, three experiments were conducted on a Brutalist website using a group of thirty-one participants. First, Nielsen’s Attributes of Usability Questionnaire (NAU), a test that focuses on five key aspects of usability: learning, efficiency, memorisation, errors, and satisfaction. Second, Brooke’s System Usability Scale (SUS) test to gain deeper insight into the users’ perspective. Third, the Thinking Aloud (TA) protocol to obtain qualitative information to complement the first two experiments.
After analysing the data of the NAU and SUS experiments, a numeric score was given to the perused website to objectively evaluate its usability and assign it to five categories, ranging from Deficient (E) to Excellent (A). Those results were complemented by the TA protocol. The findings highlight difficulties to retrieve information, navigation issues, and a lack of orientation. The use of an unconventional graphical user interface impacts the user experience. This study demonstrates that heuristics are necessary to develop robust interfaces and that deviating from these norms is detrimental to the user experience. The visual features of Brutalist websites, though striking, do not deliver a user-centred project.
This research was supported by the Dirección de Fomento a la Investigación of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) under Grant AG1533; and by the Dirección de Investigación of the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC) under Grant UPC-A-076-2021-2.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Pieter Paul Pothoven website: https://pieterpaulpothoven.com.
References
ISO 9241-11: Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Visual Display Terminals (VDTs). The International Organisation for Standardisation 11, 5 (1998)
Nielsen, J.: 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, April 1994. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
Merelo, F.: ¿Qué es un sitio web brutalista? July 2017. https://bit.ly/que-es-un-sitio-web-brutalista
Ganci, A., Ribeiro, B.: On web brutalism and contemporary web design. Dialectic I(1) (2017). https://doi.org/10.3998/dialectic.14932326.0001.107
Yates, I.: It’s Tough Out There: A Look at Brutalism in Web Design, May 2016. https://bit.ly/3tauqTS
Brooke, J.: SUS: a ‘Quick and Dirty’ usability scale. In: Jordan, P., Thomas, B., Weerdmeester, B., McClelland, I. (eds.) Usability Evaluation in Industry, pp. 189-194. Taylor & Francis, London (1996). Chap. 21
Krug, S.: Don’t Make Me Think, 2nd edn. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (2006)
Thorlacius, L.: The role of aesthetics in web design. Nordicom Rev. 28(1), 63–76 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/nor-2017-0201
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Palacios, A. (2022). Web Brutalism: Assessing Usability of an Ugly Web. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2022 Posters. HCII 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1580. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06417-3_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06417-3_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06416-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06417-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)