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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

Actually, Drudge Report is a great example of website design that works. OK, maybe you hate Drudge for political reasons, but his site gets more visitors than yours. You might be able to learn something from that.

I have visited it pretty regularly since 1998 and it is awesome that it looks the same now as it did then. There's no stuff that floats up or down or around or in from one of the edges, no blinking fucking arrow telling me to scroll down for more info (as if I hadn't figured that out since the only thing visible is three words in a 400 pt. font and that's not exactly what I was looking for), no autoplay videos, no hamburger buns, no tabs, none of what passes for "good web design." I can see at a glance what I might be interested in, and when I click on it, I get more info. A back arrow gets me back to the place I started.

Tell me again how that's bad design.

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It is classic design that just works.

The modern design aesthetic often focuses too tightly on optimizing some specific set of use cases. The problem is when they build the journey maps or whatever, the designers often don't understand the use cases completely or are specifically focused on optimizing some metric.

My local newspaper does the overdesigned path. The information you need is purposely not easy to find. Their objective is literally to make you abandon your quest and look at the "e-edition" of the paper newspaper because it generates more revenue.

In other contexts, this stuff is most obvious in responsive web apps, where the designers just bury features for whatever reason.

Matt is an interesting character and I recommend people watch him at this National Press Club talk back in '98. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvcA75f9_ik If you can't spare the 40 minutes to watch it all, skip to the end when he takes questions.

I agree actually -- I mentioned Drudge Report as another example of the phenomenon that a website can be popular without a lot of visual design. Maybe the point is that content trumps appearance.

Also good point about the design not changing. I hate that seemingly every time I go to pay my Comcast bill the UX is different.

It sounds like you're conflating appearance with visual design. I think they're barely related.

Appearance has to do with aesthetics, design has to do with use. They certainly intersect in that they both affect the end result, but their purposes are almost completely orthogonal.

My first visit to the site just now. It is hard to read the font with underlines and the divider lines on top of that.

I have no idea what the categories are, if there even are categories.

Titles like "YES.." and "3am girls", I have no idea what will happen when I click it.

It might not be "bad" but it could definitely be easily improved upon.

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