Ask HN: Why do developers like boring design? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do developers like boring design?

9 pointsbehnamoh13 comments

For example, HN has a boring design that could benefit from improvements (e.g., make it easier to up/down-vote, navigate threads easier, etc.) and yet, many people like it this way.

Another example: Most devs that I know prefer CLI over GUI, even when GUI makes their life easier.

I'm not saying pragmatic design doesn't have its place, but too much minimalism and simplicity is also not good IMO. In the HN example, some simple JS elements or better CSS wouldn't hurt.

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Most devs that I know prefer CLI over GUI, even when GUI makes their life easier.

But a GUI typically doesn't make life easier. The things I choose to do on the command line, I do there because the experience is better. I can type a few commands separated by semi-colons and hit enter, faster (by far) than I can move the mouse pointer halfway across the screen, select some drop down menu, pick an item, move to a different part of the screen, click a button, then move to the bottom of the screen and click a "Go" button. And even if the GUI has proper keyboard shortcuts, I can still, as a general rule, get things done faster using a good CLI.

And I don't see anything about my personal experience with HN that would be improved by any changes to the CSS, or any added Javascript. This does exactly what I need it to do as is today.

Maybe developers don't so much love boring design, as they oppose design which amounts to "change for the sake of change", and which prioritizes aesthetics over functionality.

Hacker News has the invisible feature that it is very very fast.

You might not realize it, but Hacker News is also highly compatible with tablets. I post so many long comments with outrageous typos because I frequently tap out comments on my iPad or Galaxy or Fire Tablet.

How is it hard to upvote or downvote? I just click on the triangle and it is done. I've seen many interfaces where browsing threads is harder than HN, not many where it is easier.

In many cases the GUI makes things harder not easier. For instance on linux I can install a lot of software by typing

   $ sudo apt-get install X

or even compile it from source with

   $ ./configure
   $ make
   $ sudo make install

and that's often easier than fumbling with a GUI that almost works on Linux or clicking and clicking and dragging and dragging on Windows or MaxOS.

> Hacker News has the invisible feature that it is very very fast

This is so important. The funniest part to me is that many companies I've worked at talk a big game about performance and speed being important to what we're building. But then every decision that gets made slows it down more and more.

It's like no one knows how to make fast software anymore. Or maybe it's just a problem that plagues web applications.

Probably the latter, honestly.

> HN has a boring design

It has a simple design that doesn't get in the way of its functionality.

And because of that, the entire page for this Ask is 19.4 KB in size at the time I write this reply. It would load instantly even via EDGE or a godamn 56kbaud modem.

Whereas with some website "designs", even a 3-paragraph 200 word nugget of wisdom, may well clock in at several megabytes.

What's also nice about "boring" designs: They render predictably, and well, on all devices. HN works on my laptop, my widescreen, my phone, my older phone, and even my terminal:

    links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540330`

This works, and the result is even usable.

> Most devs that I know prefer CLI over GUI, even when GUI makes their life easier.

How exactly does a GUI make my life easier?

What problem with HN's design do you see? What js or css would improve it? Change for changes sake is an anti-pattern as far as I can tell. In the absence of a clear problem I fail to see why a change is needed.

Watch a casual users use a website or program, and for the most part they stumble their way through.

Only via good design do they stumble in useful directions.

Developers have better models how the program/website is arranged and so don't need good design as much, and see overt styling as noise.

(I spoke in absolutes for brevity. Exceptions will apply.)

Devs optimize for how quickly you can get what you want done. fancy elements can be useful, but often can get in the way. For example, Amazon's site is pretty bland, but it's exceptional for finding what you want to buy, fast.

On the other hand, I think some devs just say "oh I'm not a UI person". I definitely think Hacker News could benefit from just making a few clickable areas larger, and more separate out (ex. Upvote button and title to have a bit more spacing)

Same reason people use CLI. GUI is good for having intuitive flows, and I love them since I use so many different tools and don't have time for full mastery of each one, but some tools like Git I still love the CLI because I use it so much I can get most things done much faster than using a GUI.

I suspect it’s that this community is optimized for quality of content and discussion. And the ingredients for providing that mean cutting out the noise of a lot of other things.

There is a tiny part of me that wants to actually navigate away from HN and to the referenced article (to actually read!) because this site is boring.

The one thing I would improve about this site is thumbnail images. Thumbnail images act as a visual hash of the article that allow me to more quickly identify which links I have read without having to reread each post title.

Developers are first and foremost interested in getting things to work and maintaining them in good working order. Simple things tend work better and more reliably than complex things. They are also easier to fix when something goes wrong.

Regarding your suggestions for HN, what would adding "some JS elements" or "better CSS" do to enhance HN? HN isn't broken, let's not "fix" till it is.

Regarding GUI/CLI:

GUIs are great for discovery of features, capabilities, and common workflows of systems. However, they're generally not composable. It is rare to find, outside of certain development tools and maybe some content creation tools (audio, graphics, CAD, etc.; editors of that sort), good or even decent scripting capabilities. And then there's the issue of coordinating across tools. Even development tools. That's where CLIs excel, they lend themselves to both composability and automation without having to hope that the developer thought of that use-case, it's just in their structure.

It's effective. Also a lot of us are using it on mobile, where every element detracts from functionality.

I love animations and stuff. I wouldn't mind if HN had a few. But awards would make it worse. Avatars would make it worse (people are judged by what they say, not who they are). There's not a lot of visual improvements needed, besides making this comment box a little bigger on mobile.

CLI is very powerful if you know what you're doing. It can be muscle memory to search for a file, open, edit, and upload it. You don't get that kind of power with a GUI.

Yeah I would agree even though it seems like an unpopular opinion.

> GUI makes their life easier

This is the topic of a religious war that has been discussed online for decades.

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