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Comment by hurricanesugar | Hacker News Reader

In design this is called “the illusion of completeness.”

“The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area.”[0]

It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens.

[0]https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-completeness/

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It's something I really miss about the height of Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8 design: the grids were specifically chosen to really to push that incompleteness feel: a few pixels from the next column over or the next row down always peaking through; big parallax landscape backgrounds that give a sense of background space that there's more to pan.

That feeling that not everything fits perfectly on the screen and things were almost always incomplete bugged a few people about those design patterns, but it did create a lot of nice, simple cues that things were scrollable without needing scroll bars or other indicators.

This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call-to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.

Exactly. So much so, you'll often see each ad prefixed with a text saying 'article continues below' (for those wondering why that text is there).

Arguably, news articles have been written from the start (even in physical newspapers) so that the most important information is listed first, knowing that many readers won't bother to flip the pages to get to where the article is continued. Giant page-ending ads online just continue this tradition, they'd rather you click three more headlines than keep reading the mostly-redundant article body.

But visual cues make your pretty screenshots look ugly! -- Apple UI designers

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