They redesigned PubMed | Hacker News Reader

They redesigned PubMed

sciencemag.org

129 pointsdredmorbius123 comments

Meh. Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users. It's pretty unavoidable. Unless there are actual, real, usability issues or feature reductions in the new UI, what typically happens is that after a few weeks of complaining, most people just get used to it. If your product is important enough, you can even get away with some usability issues or feature cuts—users will use your product in spite of those feature cuts.

A recent UI redesign that wasn't very well received is Google's code search redesign. Compare, e.g. the same page on the old one[0] and the new one[1]. It looks jarring at first sight if you're used to the old one, but ultimately people just need to accept it and move on.

[0]: https://codesearch.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/bli...

[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:t...

The new code search takes a second to load each file. The old one does it instantly. The xref panel has almost zero contrast between the section headings and the filenames. Vertical space is wasted by a "cross references" bar that persists even when closed. For some reason the blame button is at the top but history is at the bottom. The "layers" are also missing in the new version.

Yes, I just checked it. Its so fast in the old version. There is no loading spinner at all. The amount of js loaded is 661kb in the old vs 1.2Mb in the new :|

Total resources(after decompression) for the site:

Old -> 2.6MB (:thumbs_up:)

New -> 8.5MB (:what:)

It would be OK if the additional size actually bought you something, like speed. But it doesn’t, somehow the opposite is true.

> Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users. It's pretty unavoidable.

I'm usually with you, but you could not have picked a worse example - adding (or removing) latency to the critical path of how we read and think about code has large downstream effects that are difficult to measure and difficult to get fired (or promoted) for.

At some point, you do have to update the interface to move things forward. In the early days of programming, you had to manually punch cards. Then someone invented teletypes and you could program with ed. Then someone invented screens and you could use vi. No doubt each of these changes were incredibly jarring on the first day, but the change was worthwhile overall -- using a visual editor is much more productive than managing stacks of punched cards.

If everyone took the approach of never making anything that would have to be learned, our field probably wouldn't even exist.

The examples you mentioned brought usability benefits. Teletypes were obviously better than punch cards. Screens were obviously better than teletypes. Even GUIs were obviously better than CLIs for a lot of applications - they've essentially opened up new domains of work on the computer.

Here, we're talking about replacing perfectly good interface with one that's strictly inferior in terms of usability and features. Or, in the Google code search example, changing a few colors, and in the process significantly downgrading usability due to adding latency that wasn't present before.

Change is good if it brings something better, or new, or opens up the road for further improvements. These changes discussed here are doing neither.

Redesigns should never, ever happen unless absolutely necessary. They're basically never worth it and almost always worse than before.

In particular, the people doing the redesign often seem to not understand what made the first design successful/effective, and senselessly wreck parts without even realizing. I’m not sure if this is because they understand the problem less than the original designers, the institutional incentives are set up poorly to encourage high quality work, increased system complexity / technical debt is harder to work around, institutional complexity makes it harder for competent people to be in position to make the decisions, the original successes were partly down to luck and reversion to the mean dooms follow-ups to mediocrity, recent UI fashions are generically user hostile, or what... but whatever it is, it’s very frustrating.

And that’s not even mentioning the inevitable bugs and glitches.

There’s probably some selection bias involved too. Those products and redesigns which are amazing and wonderful get used, but nobody thinks too hard about all the ways in which they are better. On the other hand when redesigns negatively affect customers, the bad experience is unpleasantly memorable.

It's like rewriting a codebase. There's so much tacit understanding of the actual problem inherent in a living design/codebase. All that nuance gets obliterated because someone got a bee in their bonnet about better code/cleaner design.

Add Google Finance to this list. What a tragedy and Google still has not realized it.

Given so much discussion over the years and the fact that there were probably a lot of searches for alternatives, one has to think they probably know about it but just don't care. Why wouldn't they care? Their goals must have shifted away from those that led to the creation of the initial site - and as a result, I moved on to sites that more closely aligned with my goals.

There are many good reasons for a redesign. New features, change of scope, new UX paradigms, or the ability to do better (be it thanks to new ideas, or just having better skill set in the team than during the previous design. Or possessing new knowledge about the shortcomings of your current design).

Most computer interfaces can and should improve when the time is right.

Yes, but some key words that you've mentioned here: "ability to do better", "improve".

The kind of redesign people are complaining about involves primarily changing how things look with neutral or negative impact on overall usability. People aren't complaining when suddenly you can do more with software, or do the same things but faster. They complain when features disappear, things slow down, or buttons get moved around the UI for no apparent reasons (that last one alone is enough to confuse the elderly and people without much patience for technology).

Sure, I replied to this statement

>Redesigns should never, ever happen unless absolutely necessary

There is a place for redesign, but it has to be done properly. It's not something intrinsically bad.

Jensen Harris' The Story of the Ribbon is a brilliant post mortem for how all the right decisions still led to a terrible outcome: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 I had to watch it twice. Frankly, it kind of blew me away, back when I cared about UI design.

I generally agree with "no major rewrites" for both code and user interfaces. It's better to evolve, iterate.

There are two exceptions.

"Do overs", when you can start from scratch because of a new platform, plateau, biz model. While technically possible to iterate an architecture from sendmail (monolith) to postfix (collection of simple services), for example, it's easier (for a motivated expert) to just start over.

New metaphors. A new idea, paradigm, algorithm is so disruptive, you can just replace the prior solution. I once replaced a complicated CAD/Illustrator style production planner with a wizardy parametric designer. I once replaced a complicated BizTalk style "workflow" thing with a postfix inspired group of utilities.

Source: Recovering user interface designer, before the kids rebranded it "UX".

[FWIW, for me at least, your first link redirects eventually to same as latter, though I can then click "return to code search v1" to see what you mean ]

> If your product is important enough, you can even get away with some usability issues or feature cuts—users will use your product in spite of those feature cuts.

This is true for most software products these days; between network effects and alternatives being different enough to require relearning, users will bear a lot of annoyance before giving up. Users are sticky.

But that's not a justification for doing changes for change's sake, making things worse from one iteration to another (hello, Google)! On the contrary! The vendor is in a privileged position in a relationship here, and should not abuse it. Making pointless redesigns, reducing functionality, dumbing software down, decreasing usability - those things are making the days of many people worse, in subtle and not so subtle ways. Software scales, and so its effects, including making people unhappy.

> between network effects and alternatives being different enough to require relearning, users will bear a lot of annoyance before giving up. Users are sticky.

It's been pointed out elsewhere, but the flip side of network effects is that if you do push your users into leaving, they all leave at once. That can be hard to deal with.

> Meh. Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users

Your example is unfortunately worse than just interface change. It is also worse than just usability degradation. It is about why and how this change could take place to begin with. For the case of chromium, I think this is just change for change's sake, so that some team can get promoted, some director can justify their existence. I wouldn't blame the team for wanting to get promoted, but I would blame the process that allocated world class engineers and designers to a task that was not only redundant but also ended up being a net negative to its users. This was a process that obviously couldn't integrate user feedback, that couldn't decide "you know what, let's not release this until these issues are addressed" probably because it "had" to be released at that arbitrary deadline. This is like paperclip maximizer, only it is not artificial intelligence but corporate intelligence destroying the world one useless launch at a time.

I've also seen many a perfectly functional website redesigned and changed because it was thought to be too reminiscent of the 1990s web.

I use PubMed a lot - in the case of this redesign, I don't see any real advantages to the redesign but I see a lot to dislike.

I'm sure web designers strongly prefer the new design but actual users like me strongly prefer the old design. People trying to make money on redesigning sites sell the supposed need to look modern and site owners seem to always fall for it leaving users to pay the price in terms of lost readability and usability.

PubMed users are experts, not your average dumb user. Experts need information, not a thousend clicks and lose time in the interface. In short, they need help not to fight your website.

Pubmed has needed an upgrade for at least 15 years. The fact you could search for the exact article title in the old version and never find it says a lot.

"The fact you could search for the exact article title in the old version and never find it says a lot."

This implies the need for server-level improvements, not changes to the user interface.

For that specific example, they needed both. You could craft a custom query to accomplish that every time in the old version, but you really needed to know what you were doing. Now that they changed some defaults in the UI and made search improvements on the back end, I haven't seen that specific problem since.

With any UI redesign, you have to ask yourself: is it better or is it just different? If it's better, the improvements should be easy to point out and any changes introduced should have clear motivations.

Prettier isn't really a factor here: UI:s can usually be made prettier (which usually just means "reflecting current design trends") while still retaining their functionality (even if it requires a complete rewrite behind the scenes).

Ironically, in case of the Google code search, all they needed to achieve the new aesthetics was a bit of CSS. I can't find any reason to justify the degraded functionality.

   '''UI:s can usually be made prettier (which usually just means "reflecting current design trends") while still retaining their functionality (even if it requires a complete rewrite behind the scenes).'''

Unfortunately, the one evaluating whether is looks prettier or is more usable often has career or financial goals driving the changes rather than users true interests. How many easily readable sites have changed to "prettier" fonts and light colored text on white backgrounds in the last 15 years?

At the extremes, we know that people will even happily accept regular crashes[1]. That doesn't mean users should just accept everything without complaining (which is what your comment seems to imply).

https://9to5google.com/2016/01/04/facebook-intentionally-mad...

> If your product is important enough, you can even get away with some usability issues or feature cuts—users will use your product in spite of those feature cuts.

Messing with your users because you can is not nice.

I tried to use the new Reddit UI and it is factually less useful than the old one.

Two things that bother the most in changed UI, having less information in one screen (be it having to scroll to get the same information as the old UI or just less info than the old one) and adding useless clicks.

When I took a look at the new Reddit UI I was struck by how hard they are trying to replace browser features with in-app features. Most glaringly instead of using a browser tab, the expected behavior seems to be clicking into their modal for everything.

I used to think this, but then I realised it is complete bullshit. It is absolutely possible to please users with a UI change. That happens when the old UI was broken. The only reason users complain about UI changes is when it was "fixed" but it wasn't broken. No users are complaining when actual problems and broken UIs are fixed.

The new PubMed interface is definitely ‘prettier’ (more white space, mostly), but the old interface was packed with information that helped me quickly decide whether to read an article.

These sorts of applications should cater to experts who use them daily vs. design standards du jour or new users, IMO. /rant

Right. There's a huge value to information density, at least with certain kinds of subjects. That's been completely lost with modern design that emphasizes smooth edges and whitespace.

Yes I feel like all modernn ui design is optimized to make an app not look intimidating.

But sacrifices feature discovery and click fatigue in order to do achieve that goal.

Also, it seems like modern web designs (templates?) require a picture for every entry. How many bulleted lists of titles/links do you see on web pages anymore? Now each bullet point would be a complete entry with a picture and the title requiring lots of scrolling.

I don't know their motives, I hope there was some tech debt reduction in this redesign and that it's not just a new fancier skin.

ps: also how come they didn't roll out the thing in stages ? anybody in the medical field can tell if doctors or researchers were involved in testing a beta of this ?

There was a beta for a while but it was opt in, I think you could provide feedback but I opted against using it till they made the full switch.

On a personal note, I can still navigate the website as needed, but had to learn how to use the site again. Obviously, full functionality is still there, they just slapped a fancier skin on it with different formatting.

One minor thing that drives me crazy is that pubmed always sorted by newest papers first wherever I used now. Now it's been changed to default to "best match", which is usually not nearly as relevant to most scientists.

The new interface is dumbed down and has removed significant amount of content.

The original interface was excellent for the user community of experts.

It appears to have been designed by a third-rate UX designer for the average dummy, with no thought to what a professional user needs.

See: Dumbed down : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Original: https://pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

My relatively recent pet peeve has been ‘UX designers’ (in quotes because I respect the discipline and the many competent practitioners but refer here to the charlatans) that push their narrowly defined views of ‘form’, ‘simplicity’ or ‘minimalism’ to the extent that the end result compromises the essential functionality required by a user base.

I cannot wait for these people to leave the industry and hopefully take their dogma with them. They’re the rebirth of the same mindset that led to the ‘eyeballs are all that matter’ era of the web in the early 90s.

I guess audience is key here. Don't optimize for any user, optimize for the people actually on the site.

I agree with your complaints, but would like to save 'form' 'simplicity' and 'minimalism' from the heaping tire fire that is the pubmed changes.

Apple's design philosophy takes good parts of those three concepts and implements them well. Moving around essential functionality can be required in specific cases.

Maximalism can be just as poorly made.

The site is now responsive for a mobile viewport. That is a usability improvement in my eyes.

> "Others offered a more nuanced take, noting that nearly every redesign of a popular website is initially criticized before people learn to live with it."

For a bit of computer history, while it may sound quite far fetched nowadays, there were actually times when relaunches were generally welcomed and user numbers were expected to double rather than dropping. (Well, this was before UX.)

Do you have any insight into why this is no longer the case?

My guess is, it's about marketing thinking and rather defensive thinking in terms of consistency and world building. On the latter: We may assume that any virtual application/appliance should be rather aggressive in terms of world building in order to facilitate a comprehensive and consistent presentation (this is what Apple once was great in). When we migrated from terms like usability, screen design and interaction design to UX, this became subject to rather defensive approaches (A/B testing, "best" [i.e. median] practices, rather asking users instead of supporting them by own ideas, etc – arguably you can't manufacture meaning and aesthetics just on popular vote). Also, I'm not seeing much of a particular willingness to discuss, why prominent relaunches keep failing for years. Rather, there's now this myth of users always rejecting new designs at first. (As it turns out, in practices, either the old design returns - e.g., the infamous Ars Technica relaunch – or users won't return. And then, it's time for the next relaunch, usually with similar results.)

Edit: As an example, I suppose none of the much beloved and personality defining original Macintosh icons by Susan Kare could have come out of a modern UX work flow, nor the use of the Norwegian landmark sign as the marker of the command key. Or, where there any users that rejected the OS X Tiger and Snow Leopard UI, which applied quite radical changes to the previous Aqua UI?

Why are marketers allowed in the design department ever? I've never seen a design that made me think, "I sure am glad marketing was involved in this!".

Who said ever, "I close webpages that don't ask me to subscribe first, out of principle"? ;-)

Because the relationship between the visitor and the site is now exploitative. Marketing is there to ensure they can turn you into money. The site is just a lure, so it's built around the needs of the fisherman.

Computing has matured a bit and now 4 years after launch there aren't radically new capabilities available to make a new release impressive.

Windows 95 gave you all kinds of stuff Windows 3.1 didn't have, Nintendo 64 vs SNES is another example.

Users want upgrades, not redesigns. If you give them a upgrade, no one cares about whitespace or rounded corners, that's why those things used to be an afterthought.

Yes at some point UI/UX will need to come to the realization that they aren't that needed anymore for a lot of the software people use. Right now the industry has large amounts of money to pump in useless redesigns but this won't be forever.

> Or, where there any users that rejected the OS X Tiger and Snow Leopard UI, which applied quite radical changes to the previous Aqua UI?

I know a few people who left Mac due to this change.

I think most things are "good enough" these days. And usually the changes are just different but not really better.

I guess if the original design was flawed enough to begin with, then obviously people catch up on proper redesigns a lot easier since any good UX work will naturally make them feel more understood by the product.

Win3.11 to Win95 springs to mind here.

In contrast, going from "good UX" to "better UX" is a whole different endeavor since you'll have to fight against the friction of people having to give up routines and flows that they have been sticking to for a long time. A thing which no amount of thoughtfulness and consideration of a redesign will be able to make up for – that is, initially.

For me it started with the Ribbon interface, or maybe in the iteration before where they started hiding meny items.

For me this was the starting point.

After or around the same time someone from Gnome (or Red Hat?) realized (at least this is how I remember their marketing) humans think spatially - and used that observation to decide that everytime I click on a folder in Nautilus it should open in a new window. (Yes, it becomes a mess really quick.)

Also the insistence on removing every configuration option.

Same goes for Unity: my best explanation is someone heard Mac OS had great UX and decided to copy it wholesale: Move controls to the left. Change Alt-tab. Introduce dock.

Common for all these "improvements" is that nobody asked us users, and nobody cared to make it easy to go back.

I now have an acquired distrust of ux designers (and I am really happy whenever I meet good ones which thankfully happens often where I work.)

- Ribbon has mostly been fixed now, and is mostly pleasant to use even if the File menu is still jarring.

- Nautilus was fixed in the next major version.

- Unity was never fixed. I hear some people like it but I guess we are a good bunch of old Ubuntu users who cannot stand it. More importantly it is hard for me to see any reason besides arrogance for why there couldn't an option somewhere to get back to normal alt-tab.

The debate about whether a spatial metaphor or a browser metaphor is better for file managers has a long history. The classic Mac OS finder was designed around a spatial metaphor, which is probably what influenced the Gnome developers. Classic Mac OS nostalgics like John Siracusa [0] and John Gruber [1] argue that the spatial metaphor is superior.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2002/11/that_finder_thing

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/

I need to read up on the debate, because I'm honestly surprised by it. The "spatial metaphor" in context of a file manager sounds like complete nonsense. I'm actually surprised to see your link [1] list efficiency as a benefit of arranging stuff spatially on the screen, and their explanation doesn't make much sense (doing stuff with muscle memory isn't unique to spatial arrangement of things).

The way I see it, arranging things in space works well when you have enough space to fit these things in; once you have to scroll or zoom, the utility rapidly degrades with the number of excess stuff. On top of that, remembering where things are works when there are couple things. Not when there might be couple thousand.

For comparison, it's worth thinking about two other things human beings seem to understand and employ rather well:

1) Lists. Note that while you may put different lists in different places, you generally don't generally put each item on a separate post-it placed in a different location. List items belong together.

2) Hierarchies. That one is probably biological, and almost as fundamental as understanding 3D space. We inherently grok hierarchies - both abstract and social. We navigate them every day.

Unlike spatial arrangement, hierarchies and lists scale well. And so that's why a filesystem is a hierarchy, and it's usually rendered as either list, or - if you need to see multiple hierarchy levels at the same time - as a tree.

I'm an old Ubuntu user and I love Unity. It's pretty, space efficient, & keyboard friendly. I'm sad to see it was discontinued and don't know what I'm going to eventually switch to.

Isn't Gnome 3 more or less the same?

I at least felt Gnome 3 was about the same only it was possible to configure it.

My plan was to use the Pop OS edition since they actually had put some thought into shortcuts.

Another DE I actually enjoyed despite being initially skeptic was Elementary OS.

After KDE 5 became stable though I've stuck with thatm

New UIs are worse because of screenshot driven design.

The designer and execs only look at new screenshots of the design, and ignore usability. Maybe a few minutes of thought and review are given to how a user interacts with the site, but only to talk through a narrow set of interactions that the designer took the time to bother with.

Site keep getting less functional (reddit, linkedin, yelp, twitter) and slower (everything google). All these companies encourage short-term thinking, and incentivize whatever looks good on a powerpoint or checks a box on their year-end goals.

> New UIs are worse because of screenshot driven design.

Interesting observation. I've had this very situation with mobile apps, where users base their decision on whether to download an app largely on the basis of having a quick look at the screenshots. Adding the proper functionality and improving discoverability inevitably leads to a design which simply isn't as slick as the minimalist version. The only solution I can think of is to have an "advanced" version of the UI which users can enable.

> "New UIs are worse because of screenshot driven design."

This. (I have high hopes for Apple, now that J. Ive is gone.) However, mockup screenshots had always been the medium of communicating designs to the client. But the more prominent role of screenshots may further the concentration on just a few paths of usage, as we may observe it in the common reduction of interface options – which may be fine for the few selected usage paths and may provide the base for a "cleaner" design (which should actually be a design job, not a content issue), but necessarily fails a number of use cases.

Another point may be made about an overly application of metrics. The issue here is that all metrics that may be actually useful are in the qualitative domain, which is rather labor intensive, complex and expensive. (Especially the process of transforming qualitative data into quantitative metrics.) So everyone is going for quantitive data, which is cheap and supposedly easy. That only few of those involved have a background in social research and would actually know what they are doing, doesn't especially help. So we may add data driven design to the list of possible issues.

(Much of this may be understood in the old dichotomy of "art or engineering". While the engineering approach is fine for managing exchangeable labor, it's failing in many other aspects. Meaning, what you get is an exchangeable product and chances are that, if you actually have a unique product, this approach will fail your needs – or, at least, the needs of your customers.)

I spent way too long after Win 98 came out messing around with the gradient on the window border. Then Win XP came out and that was crazy.

Then I tried Gnome and it was superlative in comparison. Honestly, maybe it was because we had nearly nothing. Everything was new and magical.

Now we start with a high baseline. Everything is already pretty good. A redesign rarely gives me more.

I'm inclined to think in a lot of cases good interfaces turn to shit because of cargo cult interface "design" combined with ideas of 'Mobile first' and 'it's going to make us look for the quarterly reports to cut away "redundant" maintenance' (so we're going to have only the cell phone optimized site).

For a striking example, have a look at the hitherto excellent Norwegian weather site's short term forecast here https://www.yr.no/place/Portugal/Lisboa/Lisbon/hour_by_hour.... then click through to what they're humbly bragging about changing it to https://www.yr.no/en/forecast/graph/2-2267057/Portugal/Lisbo...

I can only assume neither the management nor the "design" consultant actually use the result. Oh, and consultant reminds me. Accountability is probably a major factor here. In my perception, the people causing this sort of destruction don't suffer any negative consequences of them. Maybe they even get promoted or get a prestigious client to list on their CV.

Somebody needs to write a book about how to design user interfaces when you actually care about helping your users. The closest I've seen so far are the books of Edward Tufte on showing information in graphical form.

Looking at your weather site example, this is precisely the kind of stupid design decisions I so hate about modern software. On the old site, all the data is in one place, and can be read without any interactions. You can just glance at it and learn what you need (which also means you can do that while holding a toddler in one hand, and eating your sandwich with another). Who on Earth thought that dumbing down the table and forcing you to manually switch between it and the graph (and no option to show both!) was a good idea? What's up with information moved to graph tooltips? And where has the link to download the PDF version went?

Your point about accountability is probably spot-on. These changes aren't making the website completely unusable, just strictly worse and more annoying than before. That's nowhere near enough to cross the threshold after which anyone on the vendor side would care. That, multiplied by the number of users, it amounts to a lot of man-units of annoyance, doesn't even register.

This isn't the first time this has happened with PubMed. When they first introduced their javascript application version years ago (the old site now) it wouldn't even show text of abstracts without JS. But eventually they made it so the text was always there, just badly styled without JS on.

The same thing happened with the recent SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System redesign (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/). Initially they planned to only have the very heavy SPA but after a few months of comments and complaints the team made a really excellent "basic HTML" fallback, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/core .

No doubt PubMed will implement a similar full featured fallback to sane HTML if they want to remain relevant to researchers.

At the same time ePrint https://eprint.iacr.org/ is peak web design: simple, fast, functional.

That site is wonderful. Even the “Complete contents” page, which appears to load the entire archive in one request, is snappy on my iPhone.

The team behind the site appears to be making a concerted effort to accommodate long-time users. In addition to the default Modern search interface, they also offer a Classic alternative.

Of the US government science databases that I've seen, OSTI seems to have the best interface: https://www.osti.gov/

Good search, no JS required, loads fast, and looks modern for those who care. You can even export the results of a search to a CSV spreadsheet.

I agree that is excellent.

Beloved? The first time I used the ‘old’ pubmed 15 years ago I remember thinking it really, really sucked. The weird drop down export options, clunky irrelevant filters on the main page but having to click through multiple pages just to apply a reasonable filter, unsophisticated search etc. And it still objectively sucked 15 years later, there was just no other option. To me the new pubmed is obviously better. It pisses me off that some fool with low neuroplasticity gets attention by trashing it on twitter, and ‘Science’ writes a click baity article about it. Shameful behaviour if you ask me. If anyone on HN was involved with the redesign, thank you, you did a great job.

I think they are, read some comments by a PubMed dev here on HN a while back, if I'm remembering correctly. It was not under such a clickbaity article though and the redesign was generally praised there.

The previous design was not 15 years old [1]. If you want to push back 15 years you’d have been under the influence of the (Yahoo) Toolbar [2]. The toolbar then, the Google+ whitespace now, NLM is of the times but with a governmental handicap on timeliness.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign....

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd05/nd05_toolbar.html

"some fool with low neuroplasticity"

Wow that is an intelligent insult, gonna start using that!

The new pubmed is fine. I've been using it nearly daily for a few years, so from well before the redesign, and it does the job it needs to do. You're going to get outsized backlash if you make any change with how non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is. The new version looks nicer and seems to do a better job of searching articles using citations you copy (forgot which Twitter user pointed that out). It's perfectly fine amd this is really the only article I can find about this supposed backlash - a few tweets does not signify community outrage when most researchers are probably not on Twitter and are currently spending their time panicking about the impact nonessential research shutdowns are going to have on their career goals

> how non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is

Now isn't this the deepest irony...

My profession's technology is simple, easy, well understood, logical, and clean. Your technology is evil, changes too much, and is very confusing.

> Your technology is evil

We've got ad-tech; you've got an opiate crisis.

A limited number of biomed researchers are involved n opiates. A very significant, arguably a plurality of developers are involved in and tech, either directly writing it or their business being paid from ads.

"arguably a plurality"

No, come on. That's the imaginary world where everybody is in SF and works for startups or Google. There was a recent thread about enterprise software that discussed SAP and there were all these people who were like "what's THAT??"

It's like thinking of everything being made in China because all that you notice day-to-day is consumer products.

Edit: I thought about the word "plurality" some more, and technically, anything can be a plurality if you fragment all the other categories enough, I suppose.

Are we seriously doing a contest for the worse worker? This is a war between the poor. Can we PLEASE realize that behind any of those issues there is just a handful of profit hungry capitalists?

There was something in the news about how (part of) the opiate crisis was basically caused by ad-tech.

Doctors were using free software that used dark patterns to get them to prescribe more painkillers, but the actual scandal was that the people making the software were getting kickbacks for it.

Sorry I don't have the link handy, but I probably read about it on HN.

> Doctors were using free software that used dark patterns to get them to prescribe more painkillers

This sounds interesting and I don't see a reference on google, have any links about it?

This is a dupe, original linked there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22168960

Guess what, instead of blaming one industry or the other, we should look up and we'd see immediately that it's all a result of profit motive in an immoral society.

You misspelled “surveillance capitalism”

I wonder if they consider that their problem or blame it on doctors/pharmacists?

"non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is"

They do tech and know it, just a different kind.

The tech we know in general isn't the tech this site thinks of when it says tech. Set up a qPCR run? Yes we got that. Anything information tech related? Ehh, not so much

We had thousands of years of technology before computational devices came along.

For example, there was a whole range of technology encompassed in the transition from rubbing 2 sticks together to start a fire to pocket size lighters.

The terms "developing new technologies" can be heard in the seminars in fields having nothing to do with computers, programming, or the internet. One would need a good background in calculus, partial differential equations, etc. to understand many of the talks.

---- edit: typo - replaced "we" with "with"

I think another great example of a failed redesign is Internet Archive. The old design was organized, easy to use and perfect for research on a PC like most would use when browsing this site. The new design is a "mobile first" disaster, unorganized with infinite scrolling that feels like your are aimlessly scrolling pictures on Instagram or Facebook.

I love the content on Internet Archive, but the new site has been a pain to use from day one.

I think this is really just the typical "it doesn't look/work exactly how I'm used to". Every time I have used pubmed in the past (I generally use othe databases for search) I thought how antiquated it looked and how cumbersome it was to use. At least the new website has a mobile interface that alone is a huge step forward.

The redesign also looks nice.

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Change for the sake of change is societal cancer. You can thank it for the loss of your phone's 3.5mm jack and the fact it's nearly impossible to find a gif on Google image search because it only returns video results.

This seems like a better than average redesign.

They aren't shuffling everything (Facebook), making it slow and laggy (Reddit), making constant stupid changes (Quora), or throwing out features.

What is the state of Quora these days? Especially after the pandemic hit, how many employees do they still have and how many did the furlough/fire?

I'm genuinely asking, because how the fuck does that site make any money?

The pandemic doesn't seem to have changed much at Quora yet.

There are a lot of glitches (for weeks the answer button in a request to answer in notifications returned a 500 error), lots of trolls, lots of spammy questions, and the occasional decent piece of writing. The usual. I still don't think they have a test suite simply because they keep changing every little thing.

Quora makes money on advertising. A lot of the answers are actually paid adverts which are them promoted into your feed. Read closely, as often in those top 5 lists is the company that paid for the list to be written. So many of the top 5 to do travel answers were sponsored and promoted.

Ah, thank you! I had no idea that's what they did, as most of the Q&A I come across are from first-hand sources, usually regarding some event/incident/thing that occurred.

I really like the Facebook redesign. Looks great and is just as usable as the previous version (which isn't really a high bar, but can't say there was regression). Reddit isn't that bad too, though it definitely deserves better. Quora though… Quora and Pinterest, if they disappeared overnight, I would not miss them. Annoying UX, scummy practices, garbage content.

I'm mourning the loss of the old Facebook UI - it will probably take me a few more weeks to adjust.

My first impression of it was: "Why have they turned the desktop version into the mobile version"? Newsfeed posts now in too-big-fontsize (but it's probably good for accessibility). Shortcuts on the left disappear when reading a group's stream. Etc etc moan-and-whinge-etc.

At first I thought they redesigned the site specifically to make me unhappy (because everything is about me). But a few days later "rooms" turned up ... so I assume the redesign was done - in part - to help accommodate this new Zoom-like functionality?

There's usually a good reason to change a site's look-and-feel. Have Facebook developers done any blog posts on the reasons why they redesigned, what choices they made, what new tech the redesign enables etc? Maybe learning about their journey will help me come to accept the new design more quickly.

They're keeping up with the trends. Big is the new hotness. The focus has changed to using workflows rather than organizing lots of small details. It's the same stuff happening across the art world. dribbble is a good place to see it coming down the pipes.

Shout out to my people at the Lister Hill Center (Bldg 38A)!

I used to work at NCBI when I was graduate student at UMD, more than 25 years ago. Pub Med was just being invented. There was a thing called Medline (which had been a replacement to a thing called Medlars).

The guy I worked for was an MD/PhD (math) who was publishing papers on document retrieval and natural language search. Absolutely brilliant man. There was (and I’m sure there still is) a tremendous group of great scientists there. It was mind blowing work for a kid right out of college.

Two things that came out when I was there https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(biotechnology) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spouge%27s_approximation . The environment there, and how much the researchers loved there jobs almost made it seem like getting a PhD could be worth it.

(That being said I imagine the staff researchers are not the people doing the Web UX.)

What if PubMed had something like Google's "I'm feeling lucky"? What if we could explore PubMed by selecting a random PubMed URL instead of searching? This script generates a random PubMed URL. To do this we need to know the maximum PMID number in the PubMed database. The current max is included in the script and will be saved in a 9-byte file named "max-PMID" when the script is run. If run with the argument "update" it will search for a newer max PMID. If a newer max PMID is found, the script updates the number in the max-PMID file and in the script itself. An alternative is to use the ftp server[1] to find the max PMID; I noticed the latest ftp update was missing new PMID's caught by this script. If run without any arguments it selects a random PMID between 1 and the max and outputs a URL. uses socat, GNU sed and requires a fifo named "1.fifo" 1. ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/updatefiles/

       #!/bin/sh
       test -s max-PMID||echo 32446294 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;x=$((x-1));h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
       test ${#x} -eq 8||exec echo weird max-PMID;sed -i "/test/s/echo [0-9]\{8\} /echo $x /" $0;
       case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
       (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;' >max-PMID)&
       y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|; 
       $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 >1.fifo 2>/dev/null;
       ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$x 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

Improved

   #/bin/sh
   test -s max-PMID||echo 32449615 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
   test ${#x} -eq 8||rm max-PMID;sed -i "s/[0-9]\{8\}/$x/" $0;
   case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
   (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed -n 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;wmax-PMID')&
   y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|; 
   $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 2>/dev/null|grep -o '<title>[^<]*' >1.fifo;
   ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$((x-1)) 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

I am completely blown away that they edited the stock photo to actually contain the new page in question. So many lazy "generic computer screen" images grace news articles about specific technologies.

Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

- A clear and easy to read interface - Additional information on articles (citations counts, journal scores…) - A pin function to avoid opening 1,000 tabs - The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think in the chat so we can improve it!

Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

- A clear and easy to read interface - Additional information on articles (citations counts, journal scores…) - A pin function to avoid opening 1,000 tabs - The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think!

I recall going through grad school, the only legitimate peer review according to one professor was pubmed. I tried using google scholar and she told me it was invalid, I HAD to use pubmed. The issue is pubmed is much less easy to comb through, the site itself is very basic and unintuitive, and ultimately both searches yielded the same results except that google scholar found one extra article.

She was right, Google Scholar is great for discovery but poor for reference, it accepts a lot of non-reviewed stuff.

tbh, I find the PMC redesign a lot worse. e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204679/

It uses screen real estate well but it feels weird to read from top left to the bottom right of your screen before you scroll. This makes it much harder to skim papers

In the same line of thought, I miss the old time.gov.

What if some subset of the web were set up in such a way that websites could be forked as easily as projects are forked on Github?

We could all go back to styling the web ourselves. I think the main thing stopping that is it would be difficult to deliver ads.

There is a public API for PubMed!

I'm still more annoyed by the recent Nature redesign. The new font on their site is awful

From my mobile phone the new site is unbelievable fast. A huge improvement in speed and just a better feel overall.

I haven't played with desktop site yet.

i just wish they could move it onto a different domain that doesn’t end with “nih.gov”.

People can go on PubMed, find some bad article about 5G or fluoridation from a dubious journal, and then send it around social media. The nih.gov TLD gives the impression of official sanction to all kinds of garbage.

Use Causaly.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com