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Comment by ejstronge | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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