Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Fullscreen on my 16x9 display wastes the clear majority of screen space. Is having a single, centered column considered superior to alternatives?

View on HN

Twitter has the same sort of design, but I think Google+ really draws attention to the vast ocean of whitespace by leaving a column all the way on the left.

Twitter has three columns when you load the page, but then just one as you scroll down. It doesn't look as strange.

Pinterest is the only site I've seen that will fill whatever screen size you throw at it, like God intended.

What do you think of my design? https://kitnic.it/

Banner blindness has ruined a lot of potential multi-column experiences from some basic eye tracking studies that I've done on multi-column layouts in the past.

Also... you can make the same comment about hacker news, yet here we are.

HN is one column, but it's 85% of the page. G+ content is a fixed 530px.

HN only works because the text here is short. Try reading longer posts in a maximized window. Readability studies consistently tell us that optimum column width, for readibility, is something like 50-75 characters wide (including spaces). You can get by with more width for short text like HN comments.

This is essentially a mobile-first site. Chalk it up to lazy programmers or UX folks who didn't code/design a responsive site properly.

are you sure you are looking at the right version? mine uses most of the space.

There's a setting :-

Stream Restrict stream to single-column layout on all screen sizes

do you have this on?

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