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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

The tabs especially looks like a terrible idea. Something that had more than enough space on every screen has now become a huge, long list of options that you have to scan every time to find the one you want.

Removal of icons also plays into that since they were the visual hooks you could use to navigate after a little while of usage.

Then the final redesign, I’m not sure there’s anything to say about it other than that I strongly dislike it. Services like github change their image at their peril, and I just don’t think that is worth it.

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The tabs redesign suggestion are actually one of the things I like best here!

I hate the two (it's actually THREE including the top black bar) navbars, I always get confused about where to look to find something or what i'm clicking on, and I've been using GH for years!

Yeah, but if you look at the tabs redesign, they're cheating a little. They are using a very busy repo(which most aren't) so the little numbers next to each tab are acting as a divider. Most repos would be really hard to navigate without some sort of additional separation between the tabs.

They're also ignoring any sort of internationalisation. In other languages there wouldn't even be room to label all those tabs.

I totally agree! Tens of times I tried to move to the branches page only to realise that I'm in some view that doesn't display the secondary navigation, and I need to go to main repo page first

I agree with the OP on multiple tab bars being problematic. What I think their designs are missing is grouping related tabs on the singular tab bar with dividers or colors.

One thing I hate about modern design, and this is on github etc, is the lack of use of color. Its all monochrome to look "professional" but color coding elements by function in a page can really make navigation so much easier. In the OP, just having blue, green, and yellow underlines with a gap under code / commits / branches, releases / issues / pull requests / projects, and wiki / insights / settings tabs would make visual navigation so much easier.

You could then border the file and commit list with blue and the statistics with yellow. The parts of the page related to each "topical heading" could be highlighted with color.

Once you get used to the order that will cease to be an issue quick. Think of how many windows you have open in the taskbar, and yet somehow you know exactly where to go to find the one you need. Once you know the general location it will be automatic.

The usability issue that it solves, however, is genuinely serious:

> let’s say I’m in Wiki and need to see Releases. What should I do? There’s no Releases tab visible, so I must figure out somehow that Releases are part of the Code

> Think of how many windows you have open in the taskbar, and yet somehow you know exactly where to go to find the one you need.

That's not the same thing at all because 1) you have a visual indicator (app icon) to help you find what you need, and 2) you are likely switching between windows (thus reminding yourself of their position) much more often than switching between tabs on GitHub. What you're saying is true for power users, but anyone who doesn't use the UI very consistently will still need to scan the tabs to find what they're looking for, because there is no distinct, visual differentiation between them.

That said, I agree that it solves the usability issue you mentioned, I just don't know if this was the best way to do it.

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