I am perfectly fine with main UI of HN , that is news.ycombinator.com . Although,i agree that some improvements can be made.
One Pro of main UI is that it is simple and very fast without fancy moving parts. I like it a lot.
One Pro of main UI is that it is simple and very fast without fancy moving parts. I like it a lot.
That said, maybe HN could place the logout button further away from the login name/link while preserving info density eg without a fat/dick menu. Right now, these two small touch areas on top of another are mildly prone to mis-clicking on mobile.
A reason those HN readers look like entire rewrites (besides being rewrites) is because they are not dangerous rollouts, and because they have to provide strong reasons to use them as third party sites over the "real" HN.
Literally it. Please don't break it!
The moderation system and the article ranking algorithm were completely rebuilt too. And both were biased in a direction the community hated (quite explicitly, and since before the change).
And the problem with Reddit didn't stop at the design. Yeah, the new site is slow, ugly and hard to use, but the larger issue is that the new design favors video and memes over good content. If not for that point and the lots of on your face growth-hack, I don't think the reaction would be that strong.
And none of those despised changes happened by bad luck or technical incompetence. They all come from managerial decisions. The technical act of redesigning can be harmful, but it's not as risky as they examples make it look.
old.reddit.com is full of warts (search is limited.. if not crippled), ui has zero fancy ergonomics.. sometimes full fledged bugs.. but the value isn't there. It was simple, flexible, fun, and on nice subs, you had nice convos. The end.
hn is still like that, improving secondary aspects won't make the convos better
less is more chapter 1209
ps: the only thing that I wished I had in HN was embedded articles .. so I don't comment without reading and I don't have to have a side tab for that. It's a bit lazy but that's the only recurring idea I had about HN.
You actually have to go into your profile and enable a checkpoint just to see them at all.
The thing modern web UX trends forget is that human visual system is amazing at pattern-matching and filtering. It's literally what it does all the time - subconsciously sifting through large amounts of data and focusing on things of interest. As long as there are patterns in the data the brain can use to slice and dice it, you can dump a lot of data on people with no confusion or loss of effectiveness.