I can't believe this site. I just heard of it today. The usable designs that are simple, attractive, and load fast get bad scores. The sites with annoying loading screens, annoying animations, and distracting parallax scrolling receive much higher scores, even in the usability rating. What the hell is going on?
Design trends my friend. Parallax scrolling, large HTML5 looping video and imagery, unnecessary loading screens, horizontal scrolling and my favourite of this whole unusable design trend of late: parallax layer slideshows (where pieces fly in independently to form a slides contents).<p>As a developer I completely agree with you. Making a site useful versus making a site that crams as much design fodder in as possible shouldn't be a hard decision to choose between, but here we are. The theme marketplace Themeforest are BIG perpetrators of these aforementioned trends, you won't get a theme approved for sale if you don't incorporate these, "features"