Ask HN: I realigned HN a bit, what do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I realigned HN a bit, what do you think?

I've always wanted to tweak the look of HN a bit without straying too far from the site we are all familiar with.

http://drawar.com/projects/hackernews/

http://drawar.com/projects/hackernews/single.php

As you can see I tried to keep it virtually the same, but with some enhancements to make it easier to scan and read. This was a quick 2 hour exercise (redoing the markup took the longest amount of time...no more tables) so there are a still a number of improvements that I think could be made, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the results.

What do you think?

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I'm somewhat new to HN, but I don't like the new look. The existing one is much easier on the eyes.

A good UI should not introduce new colors or visual elements that are unnecessary. Zebra coloring of rows has its place, but not here. Don't need the lines between posts (lines are for grids, and this doesn't need one). Additional box around arrows unnecessary. Text too small. Contrast of white on black at top draws eyes too much to title and menu.

Basically, please leave things as they are or ditch this design. I know you've spent a lot of time on it, but you will not gain users at as high of a rate with the new design.

Whoops, the boxes around arrows wasn't supposed to be there. The colors are arbitrary and could be changed to remain consistent with HN. As for the alternating row colors they help me (obviously we differ) in scanning the site.

I'm having trouble finding a link, but there have been user experience studies involving heat maps, etc. showing that any unnecessary visual elements distract the user.

I'm with you that I like the idea of having a strong visual indicator to differentiate different posts, but studies in UE have proven that the age-old "use zebra coloring to differentiate rows" that was used in accounting notebooks and perforated printer paper in the mid-20th century up until the 80s draws users' eyes away from the content in order to differentiate. Basically it is annoying to our brains and slows us down, but programmers like straight lines and making things neat, so the aesthetic nature of the differentiation in color and its assumed practical purpose makes us erroneously choose it over the visually simpler option.

(In reply to devmonk)

Interesting, I never read that, but now I'll have to see if I can find the study you talk about. Like I mentioned before I would rather increase the font size and then space things out a bit more, but that would offer less links on a page so it becomes a compromise.

Thinking of the type of audience HN attracts one would think people wouldn't have a problem bumping up the size in their browsers although that can be annoying to do.

Also the text for the homepage is the exact same size as the current HN unless my eyes are deceiving me. My choice would be to bump up the size of course like I did on the single page, but figured the audience was more attuned to the small size so they could scan more links at once.

TL;DR: improve the accessibility of the best comments

I've always thought the real value of this site was in the comments.

Sometimes a thoughtful comment gets lost because it has no replies, while a less substantive thread might be dominating the discussion.

The voting system doesn't always help either, since the fanboy (and pariah) effect causes some comments to be inflated (or rejected) based on who said them, not their significance or merits.

So if you can think of a good way to present the best comments for a given link or topic, that would be a useful improvement.

I suspect that most HNers don't really think that the current site has many issues.

The lack of contrast between text and background is an obvious problem though, and one that the redesign linked here doesn't really help too much, imo. Also, the alternating rows are actually kinda distracting.

However, if you are looking for more style (I suspect that most users are NOT), you can check out my project: http://quippd.com

Makes it look more like Reddit, which is a site so hard on the eyes that I just don't care if it has anything worthwhile to say.

Heh, didn't expect that comparison.

And I did this earlier in the week before the "redesign HN" trend started to appear on the site. Now I feel like a total bandwagoner, heh.

It looks great, but I don't think it will be adopted. The alternatively colored rows should be implemented, they help a lot.

Not my favorite. The current design, IMO, suites the audience and content perfectly.

HN isn't broken. So please, don't try to fix it.

Curious to know if you think it isn't broken because you are used to it or if it isn't broken because when you first came across it you thought everything was perfect?

Can't talk for sewerhorse, but I think the HN design is quite good. Following is my opinion I'm by no means a designer.

Right now there is no distraction anywhere. It's straight to the point: Here are your headlines. Read first post title, if you're interested read/open, else proceed to next headline. The meta info (points, comments,...) in lighter grey colour serves as element to visually separate the individual posts making them easier to parse.

Your design I find busier. Name of the poster and amount of comments are unimportant while parsing headlines (for me?) and thus are in the way. The light colour on #other is barely noticeable on my uncalibrated TN panel TFT and doesn't help at all. For individual post/how comments are displayed I'd say the same thing. Username/points are way to prominent vs. the actual comment itself (and the up/down vote arrows are still on the same spot :D instead of downvote to the right of the meta information)

Aside from that, your design only has different colours with a fugly orange "more" button at the bottom.

Neither your design nor the current would be more or less 'perfect' when I'd first see it but in hindsight I prefer the current one; I am better at parsing it than yours for the reasons stated above.

This pretty much says word-for-word what I wanted to post. I find the existing HN design to be one of the easiest-to-read news sites around. There's absolutely no clutter, no "design getting in the way of content", and the way the meta data (post author, date posted, etc) is small and grayed out, makes it a lot easier to just skim through the post titles. Same goes once you're in the comment section.

Rather than a new design, I think HN could more benefit from new (and optional) ways to order and present the posts and comments. I'd like to read comments in their chronological order, for example, to get a better feel of the progression of the conversation.

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