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Comment by joobus | Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated by the oscillation between straight corners and rounded corners every so often. One is popular for a while, then the trend goes the other way, and back again.

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To me, the most infuriating trend in web design is adding a crazy amount of padding to everything and increasing the font size! The old TS website packed a ton of information into a single screen, but it seems like I need to scroll quite a bit in the redesign before I see the same amount of information.

Zooming out to 75% improves the experience, but honestly I feel like I'm going crazy!

I have this theory that it's because of the "A/B-ification" of all web development. Our brains like novelty, and so when we see a different shape from what was there yesterday we instinctively prefer it, and so the A/B test dutifully reports that the new one performs better. And then two years later the same test tells you that people prefer the old shape, which is now new again.

The pendulum swing of the cool thing becoming lame and the old thing becoming cool describes all sorts of human trends.

Being a human endeavor, it always existed in web design as well. There was no -ification. Even the themes of early PHP software oscillated like this.

> Our brains like novelty, and so when we see a different shape from what was there yesterday we instinctively prefer it

How do you reconcile this with people complaining about redesigns? I tend to hate them, personally.

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