Hacker News Reader

Comment by markkat | Hacker News Reader

Hey! Just want to say thanks for the advice last round: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649787 (http://hubski.com is my site)

I took your words to heart, cut out some functional fluff, simplified terminology, and focused on hubski's UX. It seems to be having a positive effect. We now have what I like to call a decentralized social aggregator: A vote shares a story with your followers. Popular posts propagate across the community, rather than rise up a shared page. It makes sense.

Still work to be done, but your feedback was valuable. It really pushed me to rethink and focus. Thanks!

View on HN

http://hubski.com/about

I'd recommend that you don't rely on only color for the post and following telltales. Use color plus something else.

    u->oscar
    oscar->u
    u->oscar->u

For the not shared, shared, and yours icons, in addition to color you could:

    Not shared: only the center circle, no surrounding dots.
    Shared: center circle plus surrounding dots.
    Yours: center circle, surrounding dots and a line circle around that.

Extra fancy if Yours icons only get dots (inside the line circle) if they're shared posts.

EDIT: Formatting.

Thanks sixtofour. I'll test how that looks. Do you think the colors confuse? Or are too close?

Honestly I don't pay attention to specific colors. A designer (I'm not) could answer the "too close?" question better. A great book for choosing colors is Color Harmony Compendium.

Although I don't pay attention to specific colors, I like having colors, they break up the tedium. I just think they're a poor choice for a sole differentiator. For example, I always like colors while programming in a text editor, but I never use color as an indicator for what I'm looking at; the code does that. :) Colors in a text editor just break up one thing from another a little earlier than my brain would anyway, but they never tell me what I'm looking at.

That's awesome to hear. Thanks for mentioning your progress! Most importantly, I'm happy to know you're collecting metrics that affirm for you that your changes are getting a positive outcome. (Better than intuition any day!)

Fo sho. I'm building out more metrics, and that's basically the road map from here. I.e. Does it work? Thanks again.

What a great idea. Something like Hacker News, without "How is this Hacker News?" posts. :)

;)

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