The BBC News website got a redesign this week. Naturally, lots of people hate it, but that’s because people hate change. I’m largely on the other side of the fence, and, objectively, the BBC’s mostly done a good job: the site content has room to breathe, the space-wasting left-hand nav strip has been ditched, there are no rounded corners, and although the amount of home-page content hasn’t been reduced, the design feels less cluttered. (That said, as Adam Banks wryly noted on Twitter, White space is like the comma: you have to put it in the right places, not just sprinkle around.)

However, I do wonder how much testing the BBC did across platforms. On my Macs, article body text is significantly less legible than it was previously. Delving into the style sheet, it seems the corporation’s centred on Helvetica Neue in grey for most of its text (falling back to Arial for anyone who doesn’t have this installed—in other words, anyone but Mac users). This is baffling, since Helvetica Neue is designed for print design, not the screen; and while Panic sometimes uses the font on its website, it’s doing so for what’s effectively a read-once advert, not many thousands of news articles. (Crucially, Panic also has the text in black, not a mid-grey, thereby hugely increasing readability.)

The BBC News redesign is therefore a great example of single-point of failure in web design. It looks great, the layout works, and even the headings look good. It only falls down when you start trying to read an article—but unfortunately for the BBC, that’s the main point of a news site’s existence.

I waited longer than many to upgrade my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, because I was on holiday when it was released, and also Drop7 hadn’t been updated (it has now). The experience has so far been variable—while Camera is now insanely fast, Angry Birds regularly judders; I enjoy Apple’s implementation of multitasking but it’s clear it’s been responsible for totally freezing the iPhone for the first time; and folders are a joy, but moving icons around is now even more of a finicky process.

It’s Mail, though, that truly offers the best and worst updates. On the plus side, the absurd dance back and forth to access accounts has been banished via the ‘All Mailboxes’ view (although it often freezes while downloading email from multiple accounts), but the way Apple has implemented automated threading is bonkers.

The way things work is fine until you actually bother to read something. Emails that are part of a thread are gathered together and flagged by a number denoting the messages in the thread. Tap it and you see the overviews of the thread’s messages, in reverse chronological order, so the latest one is at the top. This is all fine, but in the mailbox the thread’s overview is shown not by the most recent message, but by the earliest available one—and this changes depending on how many messages Mail is allowed to store.

The net result of this is that when threading is turned on, you see several new messages and then a very old one, followed by more new ones. To see an overview of the latest reply to a thread, you have to enter it, which is absolutely horrid from a usability standpoint. Not only should this action not be forced, but users shouldn’t see an overview and then jump to an entirely different message—it’s confusing.

Apple should make Mail threads show an overview of the latest email within the thread—something that would be logical and helpful. At the very least there should be a setting for this.

So I just went to Google’s home page, to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s what I saw:

After checking my surroundings to make sure that I hadn’t abruptly time-travelled to 1996, my web designer side kicked in and wondered what possessed Google to utterly destroy the basic fundamental usability of its search engine’s home page.

One of the core benefits of Google’s search engine has always been its simplicity. It gained marketshare by avoiding all the crud rivals added to ‘expand’ the search experience for users. With Google, you got a plain white page with a search box—simple and efficient.

Having used other Google products, I always had the nagging doubt that the Google home page aesthetic was more down to the company’s lack of design skills than anything else, and this new update pretty much confirms that. The current page has a background that makes it extremely difficult to read any of the on-screen text. It’s the kind of abomination that would have gotten a junior web designer fired from any self-respecting agency in 1996, let alone in 2010.

In an added nail to the coffin, the ‘change background image’ link that you can just about make out at the bottom-left of the page (that is if your eyes haven’t already exploded) doesn’t actually enable you to remove the background. Instead, you have to sign in to your Google account, assuming you have one. From a user-experience standpoint, this is crazy, but maybe Google just doesn’t care—after all, there are no ads on its home page.

Lukas Mathis has written a great piece on Safari Reader. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s new in Safari 5. Using a keyboard shortcut, a panel slides up, containing the content of the article you’re reading, stripping everything else. In many cases, it also manages to stitch together multi-page articles automatically. The typography in Safari Reader is suspect, but the idea itself is what’s caught the attention of many people, who are proclaiming it to be the Worst Thing Ever (Ars Technica seems particularly miffed).

The reason for the anger is because Reader strips the ads, the branding, and everything apart from the content. As Mathis notes, though: “If your users are using a third-party product to make your product usable, you are doing something wrong.” That is a sentence that every single content provider on the web should read several times, digest, and, if necessary, write in permanent marker on both hands.

Something like Safari Reader shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and that’s because the majority of content providers now offer such a poor reading experience online, burying content in amongst dozens of ads, or splitting up small articles across dozens of pages, in order to maximise ad impressions. This is a hateful, cynical, user-hostile approach, and it’s precisely because of this that the likes of Reader and the wonderful Instapaper exist.

In my life as a web designer, I’ve watched in horror as companies have forced clean, efficient designs to mutate into nasty ad-infested, unreadable disasters. The questions “Can’t we get at least one more ad above the fold?” and “Can we make the text smaller, so we can fit more on the screen?” still fill me with horror. And I’m constantly baffled by online publications that see fit to split a 20-item gallery of tiny images over 20 slow-to-load pages.

I’m not saying ads are inherently bad, nor that they should be removed from every website. Just don’t make them the focus. And in some cases, splitting articles in a sensible manner can actually aid usability, even taking into account the ‘infinite’ height of web pages. Just make sure that if you’re involved in any aspect of creating a website that you don’t make the user’s experience so bad that they feel compelled to use third-party technology in order to easily read your site’s articles.

Since I was at school, I’ve been accused of being a Mac fan-boy. In the old days, this was down to me having the audacity to suggest that Macs were actually pretty good and rather usable. Detractors suggested Macs were toys, and the Mac OS was for people who didn’t know how to use a ‘real’ computer (rather than people who just wanted to get things done). “Real men,” I was told, “use the command line.”

Not a million years later, Windows evolved from a piece of garbage into something that was actually pretty good (Windows 95), largely by ripping off the Mac OS. “A-ha!” I’d say, only to have fan-boy-accusers say that now it was obviously OK to have a GUI, because [insert spurious reason that only makes sense ‘because’]. Right.

This pattern has continued into my professional career. Of late I’ve been called an Apple fan-boy on an increasingly regular basis, due to my love of iPod gaming and taking the royal piss out of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series efforts. Shots that have been fired my way echo Paul Thurrott’s contradictions that were nicely summed up by Chris Grande a couple of days back.

When iPhone OS arrived, Thurrott derided its lack of copy and paste, saying it was “unreal” that such a feature was “inexplicably missing from the iPhone”. Anyone arguing the toss (either that the feature wasn’t really necessary, or agreeing with Apple’s stance that’s it’s better to do something right, even if that means taking longer to deploy it) was a Mac fan-boy.

Fast forward to the present day and Microsoft’s stated its Windows Phone revamp will lack copy and paste (and there’s no consensus on whether the company is working on a solution—some claim it is, and others say the opposite). Thurrott now states: “No matter”. I’ve experienced pretty similar reactions from people on the Apple/Microsoft scrap. According to some, Apple’s closed ecosystem and lack of third-party multitasking were the most stupid things in the history of tech, but now Microsoft’s doing the same, they’re somehow fine. Anyone defending Apple’s stance before was a fan-boy, but anyone attacking Microsoft for taking up the same position: also a fan-boy.

I find this a strange, somewhat deluded and often hypocritical argument, but there is of course one major difference between today’s mobile space and the early 1990s desktop PC ‘war’: the positions have been switched. Microsoft’s still using its photocopier and playing catch-up, but this is all the more apparent now it’s the underdog with a lower marketshare. It’ll be interesting to see how the two companies fare over the coming year or so. I’m hoping Apple wins the long game for the first time (and also that other rivals—Google, Palm—force Apple to innovate rather than just cloning Cupertino output)—the company cares more about experience and design than marketshare and dominance. I’m sure this stance will have me branded ‘fan boy’ for years to come. So be it.