Shitty restaurant websites

Aug 9

Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Apr 21

Bombay Restaurant, San Diego

This Indian restaurant in San Diego has a crappy website: full Flash, unskippable gratuitous animated intro, autoplaying audio.

But what really takes the cake is the menus! To access them, you actually have to click and drag down, like lowering a draw-pull curtain over a window. That’s quite unintuitive and the interface really gives you no affordances to help you along. It just says “drag here” when you hover over it. This might be OK if you could also access them by just clicking as usual, but that does nothing! Ze clicking, it does nothing. I am impressed by how bad this is.

Apr 2

My other tumblr, Fuck Yeah Artisan Bread

I haven’t posted much here because making fun of shitty full-Flash websites for world-class restaurants turns out to be quite empty.

I’ve been posting more on my Tumblr about making bread, Fuck Yeah Artisan Bread. I should have a post about spelt sourdough soon (it’s fermenting as I type this) and also one about baking bread with ocean water. Maybe you could have a look? Bread is pretty good stuff, I think.

Feb 8

What The Oatmeal Wants From Restaurant Websites

The elements of bad restaurant websites he points out appear on nearly every restaurant featured here: the menu can only be downloaded as PDF; inability to copy/paste text due to the site being full Flash, and so forth.

Feb 6

Domo Sushi, San Diego. Sushi, in Santee? Huh.

Well, we have the usual band of offenders:

Full flash, fixed-width. Of course it doesn’t use any of the accessibility aids Macromedia built into Flash years ago, so accessibility-wise it is bad.
Autoplaying audio. It can be turned off by a fairly noticeable sound icon, which is the convention for disabling that annoying “feature.”
The typography is not good. It looks like a synthesized italic version of Comic Sans appears throughout the site. The default font only comes in two weights: regular and bold. What kind of fucking psycho takes Comic Sans and then forces their image editor to make it italic?
The “Menu” navigation item has a thumbnail gallery, but each entry is just called “Untitled.” Probably the site uses some third-party gallery widget and whoever made the site didn’t fill in the title fields in the XML/database it uses to display images. The scrollbar is nonstandard and the arrows on it do not appear to actually move the element, a typical example of a failed non-standard interface element that shouldn’t exist. The alternative to the thumbnails is downloading an 800K PDF. We already know that users hate PDF.
“About” and “Location” do not appear to have the restaurant hours. The Yelp page does, though, so if your instinct would be to check there you would wind up finding it. Many people wouldn’t. At least they have a phone number.
The saving points: the food does look yummy and I’ve heard it’s pretty good. It tries to clearly indicate where the restaurant is located.

Jan 6

Bouchon Bistro, Thomas Keller's bakery

Thomas Keller is best known for Per Se and The French Laundry, but he actually has other restaurants, including this cute little chain of bistros. I’m sure the steak frites are yummy.

But what a stereotypically bad website this is. The usual full Flash (of course!) but now it has its own ridiculous hierarchical navigation scheme where you have to click several times to see only a part of the menu. To go back, you have to work within the stupid navigation system they have set up and oh my god does it make you wish for the back button.

What has Jakob Nielsen been saying since 1996? Don’t break the back button. It’s good advice. If that means you can’t use your space age continuations-based web framework or create your brilliant all-Flash giant fuck you to mobile phones because of that rule, I’m sorry, the user’s needs come first. (And, for the record, with the advent of Ajax in the last several years most of the original use cases for continuations in developing web applications are moot.)

The usual drawbacks of a full-Flash site apply: text can’t be resized, highlighted, copied, pasted, and you can’t email anything to anyone except the top-level URL.

Adding on to this, this website has 1999-style custom controls that are bound to be a nightmare for users.

Thomas Keller’s passion for great cooking and great restaurants is exceeded only by his restaurants’ websites’ passion for being really lousy.

Jan 5

JV's Mexican Food: a local taco shop whose website is better than Babbo's or Arzak's

This is the website of a taco shop a couple miles from my apartment. The fonts and colors are silly, but it clearly explains that it’s a little taco shop in San Diego. The design is consistent across all the pages. The menu is in plain HTML, not PDF, and the hours are under the “contact” page, which is a reasonably logical place to look for that information.

Merely by not making well-known basic mistakes in web design, this humble little shop has a website that is better than that of many world-class restaurants. As it so happens, their famed surf and turf burrito is merely kind of good; JV’s isn’t actually all that great, they just have good value, friendly, speedy service, and bigass portions.

Jan 4

Apropos of nothing, I made this and was obviously ridiculously proud of myself for paraphrasing a classic fallacious mathematical argument (“every number is interesting”) to the cancer that is killing Wikipedia.

This video about Arzak does a much better job of conveying what makes it special than Arzak’s own website, even though it’s entirely in Spanish and I can’t understand more than every 5th word they’re saying.

$What kind of website does the restaurant considered by many to be the best in the world deserve? Apparently, Spain’s Arzak deserves the usual all-Flash treatment and a weird design. Why are the menus asymmetrical like that? Why is it so small and fixed-width? It’s not like Flash is especially mobile-friendly. Browsers of at least 1024x768, but more commonly 1280x1024 are the norm and at those resolutions it looks like one of the old designs from 1996 where the site is designed for 640x480. The layers of overlapping text and graphics are confusing and will look like a blurry mess to people with poor eyesight (a substantial fraction of web users, especially ones who can actually get a reservation at this place). When you first visit the website, there’s not much to indicate that you’re actually at a restaurant’s website. All we have below the navigation when we first arrive at Arzak’s site is an out-of-context narrative from the restaurant owner, which users probably won’t read based on what we know about how users read and navigate websites. Users need to almost immediately figure out what they’re looking at based on implicit cues in the design and content of the site. A website has a few seconds to convey that information to users or they’re gone and they’re not coming back. Arzak’s site clearly assumes you already know all about it and it can launch right into somewhat-irrelevant historical information. Even though I know Arzak is world-famous, I personally don’t know specifically what makes them so great. This website does almost nothing to answer that. The lack of identification and clear explanation could actually create issues of trustworthiness to a casual browser: is this the actual Arzak? The best resturant in the entire god damn world has a website that looks like this? Well, surely any serious prospective diner will know what Arzak is and will make a beeline for the “Reservations” button, right? Probably. Arzak is world-famous and they’ll never have problems finding enough customers to pack the house. But why should the burden be on the website visitor? It’s a restaurant, not an investment bank that every Harvard grad wants a job at. A good website will grow your business for you and inform people who might not otherwise be customers about what it is you do. This is just confusing and weird in my view, and I’m not even going to pick on the typos and poorly translated English that appears throughout this aborted fragment of a website.$

What kind of website does the restaurant considered by many to be the best in the world deserve? Apparently, Spain’s Arzak deserves the usual all-Flash treatment and a weird design.

Why are the menus asymmetrical like that? Why is it so small and fixed-width? It’s not like Flash is especially mobile-friendly. Browsers of at least 1024x768, but more commonly 1280x1024 are the norm and at those resolutions it looks like one of the old designs from 1996 where the site is designed for 640x480.

The layers of overlapping text and graphics are confusing and will look like a blurry mess to people with poor eyesight (a substantial fraction of web users, especially ones who can actually get a reservation at this place).

When you first visit the website, there’s not much to indicate that you’re actually at a restaurant’s website. All we have below the navigation when we first arrive at Arzak’s site is an out-of-context narrative from the restaurant owner, which users probably won’t read based on what we know about how users read and navigate websites. Users need to almost immediately figure out what they’re looking at based on implicit cues in the design and content of the site. A website has a few seconds to convey that information to users or they’re gone and they’re not coming back. Arzak’s site clearly assumes you already know all about it and it can launch right into somewhat-irrelevant historical information.

Even though I know Arzak is world-famous, I personally don’t know specifically what makes them so great. This website does almost nothing to answer that. The lack of identification and clear explanation could actually create issues of trustworthiness to a casual browser: is this the actual Arzak? The best resturant in the entire god damn world has a website that looks like this?

Well, surely any serious prospective diner will know what Arzak is and will make a beeline for the “Reservations” button, right? Probably. Arzak is world-famous and they’ll never have problems finding enough customers to pack the house. But why should the burden be on the website visitor? It’s a restaurant, not an investment bank that every Harvard grad wants a job at. A good website will grow your business for you and inform people who might not otherwise be customers about what it is you do. This is just confusing and weird in my view, and I’m not even going to pick on the typos and poorly translated English that appears throughout this aborted fragment of a website.