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Comment by duckfruit | Hacker News Reader

Great read. This could have just as well been titled "Guidelines for Web Design That Respects The User" or "Web Design that Doesn't Suck"

Summarizing:

1. Don't break accessibility

2. Clearly label hyperlinks

3. Make sure your buttons look like buttons

4. Dont paginate for the sole purpose of padding engagement numbers

5. No to decorations that distract from the content

6. Dont break the back button

7. 'Performance is not a feature'

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> 7. Performance is a NOT a feature.

I think you meant to say "Performance IS a feature." (That is what the page says as well)

I have no idea what that section is trying to say? It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument. It isn't a primary feature but a result of following minimalist criteria is another..

The example that a long book of text downloads in a second seems to be saying the latter..

It's saying that low TTI is an emergent property of this style.

> It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument.

An argument that no one listens to, which is why the web isn't performant and is instead full of bloated junk. They are acting like performance isn't even a feature, like users don't care about it and shouldn't have it. This is wrong.

^-- Is what that section is saying.

Performance should not be sold as a new feature; it should be one of the main drivers from the beginning. I remember reading the verge redesign article where they raged about the speedups compared to their previous site - and the new was still bloated.

Agreed. It’s like advertising that a car has an engine and goes faster than walking. Having an engine isn’t a feature, it’s the the essence of what makes a car, a car.

You are right, sorry. When I first read it I internalized it as meaning to say that Performance is not an extra feature that you tack on to an existing web app (like you would implement say an offline mode as part of an update) but rather something that needs to be considered from the ground up right in the design stage. But I can see how putting it this way could be confusing.

All of this can be achieved without looking like a text file. This form of brutalism feels like a reaction to BAD design. Step into the world of good design, which does exist, and suddenly these points and much more is being addressed in UX and UI design.

>A website is not an application or a video game. It is for content, and so its design must serve that purpose.

Apparently it could also be titled "Guidelines to make the web great again" or "Guidelines for blogs in 1995" for all the relevance to modern web design.

I appreciate the analogy to architecture. Specific words are useful. You can communicate more information succinctly by labeling something skeuomorphic, brutalist, material, etc.

If web-brutalist just means "usable", adding a new misleading word that means raw / concrete is not useful; it's... anti-brutalist

Then it would be a user experience theme, not a design style.

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