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> The card layout is generally big no-no in design community.

I disagree-- it would appear to be exactly the opposite if you look at current design trends (checkout dribbble.com), cards look to be a very big yes-yes in the design community. I believe googles implementation of the cards within Google+ very poor UX. If they made each card the same height so your eyes can move about the page more orderly it might make Google+ more palatable. You are right in that it is very hard to digest the content with that design.

Trending design ≠ efficient design. Lot of me-too designers try to copy what's on popular websites even though it's clearly a wrong approach and that's how bad designs become viral (Jumbotrones is another example which has become viral but has measurably lower engagement metrics). Also many designer falls in to side-by-side measurement trap while what they should be measuring is users engagement metrics. Card layout looks pretty in PowerPoints and SBS numbers would generally shine but any designer who have actually measured actual engagement metrics with card layout would agree that it's horrible idea. BTW, I'm taking about card design where there are more than one horizontally laid-out cards.

Pinterest?

Design is only a part of the experience, most of the value comes from usefulness.

It depends on the content and the users' goals.

Pinterest is mainly focused on pictures and its users like to scroll at leisure through long lists, collecting items that catch their eye. On the other hand, G+ is more focused on reading single articles: notice an interesting headline, read the first few lines, click to read more.

This distinction between grazing for images and hunting for text articles is why lack of horizontal alignment makes Pinterest more enjoyable and G+ harder to use.

Didn't say it was the right thing to do but that is surely up for debate though it is definitely a current design yes-yes. Personally, I like the card trend. It makes designing for responsive a bit easier and I enjoy the material looks which plays well with "cards'.

> The card layout is generally big no-no in design community.

Interesting. Could you provide any links/citations for this?

I ask because it feels like practically every designer I talk with these days wants to force a card layout onto everything (even text-oriented sites) and I'd love to hear the other side.

+1 for a damned list ...

I mean look at the front of hacker news.

Speed. Read.

HN isn't considered great design by majority of users outside this community.

It isn't necessarily considered great design inside either, judging by how popular Hacker News plugins and readers are.

But a pretty strong argument can be made that, for sites focused primarily on text and reading, simple layouts may sometimes sometimes be better than complex ones.

HN is kept this way on purpose. That the GenPop doesn't like it is a feature, not a bug.

As for designing sites focused on reading, I wholeheartedly agree with this: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com.

Almost. I agree more with this: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

This is great! Together, they form a perfect design philosophy!

>"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." >- Eleanor Roosevelt

Why are the default styles so bad?

The whole site tries to explain that.

There are two interpretations of your question, which do you mean?

1. What is wrong with leaving HTML completely unstyled and allowing the browser to apply its defaults?

2. Why is it that the default settings applied by (most) browsers are so awful?

The answer to the first is pretty much, as another HNer noted, the topic of the Better Motherfucking Website page. The defaults suck.

Why the defaults suck is ... probably an accident of history that's difficult to undo. Browsers default to no margins and a whole slew of other stuff, and CSS requires that you either start from known defaults or explicitly style each and every element.

If every browser used its own distinct set of deviations-from-default for various entities, CSS would be even more of a hack than it already is.

Some of the fault also surely lies with standards organisations, including the W3C. If they elected for specific defaults to be applied to all pages, and, by some miracle, browser vendors actually adhered to these, you could conceivably have a world in which most Web pages didn't need much if any styling, and where users could choose to apply default styling to pages.

I do this presently via uBlock and uMatrix on desktop, and via ReaderMode on Mobile. I virtually always prefer the simplified, standardised view to a site's native design.

You've asked a simple question, but a deep one.

The default styles are lousy because there's no reasonable standard on how pristine HTML5 untouched by CSS should look. So browser developers make assumptions because they figure everybody will just use CSS anyway.

Fortunately, we have stuff like normalize.css (https://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/) nowadays.

>A little less contrast

Other than this, I agree. Black on white is fine, and hell no, don't make the background slightly gray. If my display is too bright I turn the brightness down.

Do you dislike the slightly grey background on HN? I can't say I really notice such things.

Oh, yes I do. And I hate the grayed out downvoted comments. I have a chromium HN plugin that fixes the background.

> HN is kept this way on purpose. That the GenPop doesn't like it is a feature, not a bug.

The "GenPop" don't even know this site exists and, if they did, would be turned away by the content, not the layout.

That argument is made here often, that somehow liking the plainness of HN's layout is a shibboleth to detect quality users, but i've never really bought into it. Sites like Craigslist, Reddit and 4chan manage to do quite will with relatively simple looks and broader appeal.

I wasn't really trying to make an argument out of it; I think there's a direct quote from pg floating somewhere that this is one of the reasons HN's design is kept bare-bones. I may be misremembering though.

EDIT: I found one quote:

"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Fair enough, but even if pg said it I still disagree with the premise, albeit respectfully. You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle. The problem lies in the assumption that plain design will "repel" one kind of user, but attract another, I don't believe it does.

> You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle.

That I agree 100% with. I too believe that. Hell, I find myself liking simple layouts more than what's the usual startup trend for pretty backgrounds (and background videos; whoever does that deserves to have their Internet access limited to crappy 3G modem with fixed rate of $0.1/MB) and fluff.

Personally, I think HN is actually too simple. Reddit seems uglier, but they have lots of very small features that greatly support discussion on the site. I actually think that the interface for general discussion on-line lies somewhere between HN and Reddit - simple but useful tree-like forum.

One thing i've found odd about HN is that the only really customizable feature for logged in account seems to be the background color of the top bar, after you get enough karma. Just imagine how many complaints people wouldn't be making if they could adjust the default text size, line height or some other colors?

Yeah. I don't really understand why this feature even exists. Maybe it's some artifact of HN's history, pg experimenting with that particular part of HN's engine in Arc or something? Because this and all the other things you've mentioned can be accomplished by user setting up an additional CSS for the website client-side, with an implicit assumption that audience here is generally smart enough to figure out how to do this.

Also, the orange bar is basically the single visual element that makes HN HN, so I don't know why people would even like to customize it...

There's some mystery here.

Back in the day, Myspace would embed any arbitrary CSS you pasted into your profile. I'm not suggesting Hacker News make itself that hackable (it would be hilarious, though, if they added that "feature" to the thread submission form) but it seems like it should be a bit more hackable than it is, given its nature.

It's not great graphic design, true. But I'll take it over garbage like grandparent's screenshot any day.

The problems I've got with HN would with one exception be best addressed with less design.

It assumes fixed screen / viewport widths and font sizes. Foreground / background contrast is poor. The more code: collapsable subthreads.

Otherwise, it's a basic text-heavy design for a text-heavy site.

It gets the job done for the audience. It's very fast. There is no clutter.

Therefore it's almost great design. Up/down buttons too close together for reliable use on touch screens (because of the inability to correct a mistap) is what's keeping it one step short of greatness.

Design is experience. Graphic design is almost orthogonal.

Great UX but the UI isn't as appealing to everyone outside the HN community.

But Google+ used to be single column! Then one day they switched to the two-column card layout, the content was exactly the same but suddenly you needed to scroll up and down to be able to read both columns. (i.e. when you finish reading an item in one column you have to scroll back up to get to the beginning of the next item in the other column).

I really wonder why they decided to change it.

It definitely looks better when viewed as a screenshot or in a graphic design presentation. Of course actual usability is far worse, but nobody cares about that. Only how shiny it is. The people making the decisions on which design to go for are given screenshot or mockup presentations in 5 minutes and asked to choose which design to go for. They will always go for the shiniest one, and you end up with stuff like this.

There's some comment about the low attention span we force on executives by making them take 1000s of decisions per day that they aren't even experts in and rewarding them for it in all this.

Somewhat counterintuitive... I mean Google knows better than relying on stills for what is interactive content, right?

I don't know, did they ever hire an Apple designer? Ah, no, they had a no-poach agreement. Perhaps they had to revert on poaching Pinterest designers, though.

... you honestly think Google has no analytics on whether or not design changes affect UX? And that they'd stick with a significantly worse-performing page?

They will only have numbers for the people that are actually using Google+. The millions that prefer other social networks may have different views on the G+ usability.

> But Google+ used to be single column!

...

> but suddenly you needed to scroll up and down to be able to read both columns.

I guess many of us don't read any column in google plus, we just glance them and take a closer look at a few things.

... > I really wonder why they decided to change it.

I have a couple of reasons why they might have done it:

1.The focus is on lots of short-form (think twitterish).

2. Stacking smaller blocks sideways neatly lets you format posts themselves the same way in multiple screen resolutions.

Twitter is a darling it seems despite wasting most of my screen.

Google plus is hated for everything despite being IMO a better product both technically and design-wise.

It's in vogue in the design community where the primary use case is passively consuming images and media. This seems to be where Google is sending Google+, and how all the feeds I still have followed on it are using the service -- sentence of text + image/video.

From what I understood in the post and a few reviews of it, Google don't (and shouldn't) want to compete with Facebook in friend cross-posting interaction activities.

> Making consumption choice-free, decision-free and friction-free should be the guiding principle in all social apps.

In what world is that true? The point of social interaction enabling apps is to increase the likelihood of users regularly choosing to abandon passive consumption and interact with things. Friction is the only thing in your maxim that makes sense I'm afraid.

As one of those loyal Reader users, I have since switched to Inoreader via Feedly. For me, there is no single view that works for everything, really -- and the nice thing about a proper feed reader is that you can have a customized display per feed group.

My articles are normally either in list or magazine views, and only graphically-heavy feed groups (like comics or photos) are in card view.

Amazon's UX designers feel the same way. G+'s card layout does not make it easy to infer what's the latest vs the most commented on item and what the logic is behind it's positioning laterally. I think basic gestalt principles in cognitive science would support the problem with laterally adjacent but vertically edge overlapping tile placement.

> The card layout is generally big no-no in design community.

Pinterest.

Pintrest is different use case. Pins typically have little other content than images for consumption and card design works great where major content is images.

That's different. You're supposed to peruse like a catalogue.

A site I hate, avoid like the plague, and block via /etc/hosts where possible.

But thanks for the example.

I'm sure Pinterest appreciates that. Users outside the target market drain resources for no benefit.