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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

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yoz-y

Not a fan of most of these:

- They are all extremely inconsistent

- Checkbox is the only one with 2pt outline

- Padding is all over the place between color/time/date

- What is a button? A grey rectangle with an outline? A black glyph? A blue text without outline or underline?

- Up/Down to switch months does not make intuitive sense. Time could go either way.

- The color picker looks seriously unfinished. It's like somebody threw some controls on a dialog in a RAD and let them where they first landed.

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I really don’t understand what designers are thinking these days. Do they actually use the stuff they are designing? I spend a lot of time randomly swiping and clinking on my iPad in the hope of finding something I am looking for.

I know this might come off as trivializing hard work, but I think many feel that their work must be _different_ to a high degree or they haven't put enough of themselves in the work.

Related, Battle chess duck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess

Inconsistency seems to be the name of the game here: depending on which webserver the loadbalancer sends me to (I can only speculate that this is the case?), I get a different favicon for this webpage! [0]

[0] https://i.imgur.com/GdAmNUt.png

Ok... how did you notice this?

I have a habit of opening the same link multiple times, since it's sometimes easier to click the link in the thread than to Ctrl+PageDown to switch tabs.

In this case, I had it open, came back to the HN thread to leave a comment, opened the site again to look some more (twice?), came back to the thread and read someone else's comment about consistency, went back to look at what they were saying, and that's when I noticed the icon was different compared to the other three tabs of it I already had open.

Interesting. No matter how many times I request it I get the same icon. Probably a caching proxy? Weird that you didn't see the same though.

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I'm currently able to reproduce both icons being served (in Firefox on Windows) by doing a hard refresh (control+shift+R) twice in a row, then doing a normal refresh (control+R) twice in a row, repeating the sequence a few times. I'll consistently see different icons throughout this process.

Probably an A/B test?

I wonder what metrics they're measuring for the favicon A/B split.

The date picker is worse as well. Harder to determine day line from list of data. Whole thing looks like raw data before a format/style is applied, minimalism at its worst. Harder to determine last/next months dates from picker Why up/down for past/future instead of left/right, maybe its a cultural thing of writing from left to right but I always imagine time as moving into the future from left to right. Today button is an improvement over the dot.

Totally agree. They are requesting feedback so maybe you can let them know about these points.

I am tired of giving MS feedback. Either you get no answer or some standard text snippet from a bot and nothing ever happens anyway. It’s a waste of time in my view.

Except the "smiley face in the top-right to Send Feedback" can't be found anywhere on the page.

> Except the "smiley face in the top-right to Send Feedback" can't be found anywhere on the page.

Because it's the smiley face in Edge, not in the page.

They are requesting feedback from within the application. There is no way for us to give feedback without installing Edge or Chromium.

Sure there is. Uninstalling Edge and Chromium are the easiest ways to provide feedback. You can bet your bottom dollar that there's telemetry tied to uninstallations.

Last I remember Chrome even obnoxiously prompts you to fill out a survey on why you uninstalled.

The color picker in particular is a massive step backwards. I've always thought the normal Windows color picker could stand some improvement and additional features. But this is moving in the wrong direction by taking away features.

Also, note that the images on this web page are being scaled to fit the blog's width. Not all images are shown at 1:1 zoom, so some will be stretched. I noticed the horizontal lines in the standard text box were fuzzy and realized it was being scaled by my browser.

Imagine listing out the months of the year in one column on a blackboard. Obviously January would be at the top and December at the bottom. If you had to list the hours of the day, 00:00 would be at the top and 23:00 at the bottom. I assume this is the logic they're using. (This is also how time is referred to in Mandarin -- the past is above and the future is below; last week is literally "the week above".)

I don't agree that January would obviously be on the top. Consider that almost everything on the internet nowadays has the most recent piece of data on top: Twitter, Facebook, Email threads (anti-top-posting battle was lost years ago).

As for Mandarin, yeah, that is true, but that is just one language among many. Some languages refer to past as "front" and future as "behind", should we make a 3d picker too?

One reason they went with up/down may be to shelve the problem with right-to-left languages. But in that case they should use something more obvious. Note that a three letter abbreviation of a month is also not that much larger than an arrow...

I’m really hoping that those are different screenshots that were scaled poorly

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