Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcroixx | Hacker News Reader

I'd consider readability to be paramount in any design described as utilitarian. HN is one of the most readable sites I visit.

UI/UX in software is a field which, to me, hasn't found it's feet yet. In physical architecture(buildings), there are common patterns recognized to be aesthetically pleasing and useful. Industrial design like the cockpit of a car has done the same. Most people recognize a door or a steering wheel instantly and can make use of them. I don't think these things have materialized yet in software. So if your goal is to create software for a specific purpose and you don't have the interest, time, or budget to solve this general design problem, you're just going to punt on it and make the UI basic and functional.

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> HN is one of the most readable sites I visit.

Funny, I find it quite hard to read, since it just blows posts out to nearly full screen width. Humans read much better with wraps at 60-80 characters. The first line of your comment, on my screen, is 196.

HN gives you the power to decide your own preferred width for reading, instead of imposing a given value upon you. By not mandating a predefined width, you have full power to view it in any width you choose, simply by either adjusting the width of the browser window within which you read HN, or by setting up a local custom user stylesheet for HN to configure HN to your personal preference.

Yeah my browser sits at about 55% of my screen width in my tiling WM, and it makes HN perfectly readable.

I have a 27" 4k monitor. I love that hackernews fills my screen. I detest the modern web design of capping the line width at giving me the middle 10% of the screen and making the rest white space. We moved on from 12" CRT screens, let us use our screen space.

Yeah, I struggle to keep track of where I am reading when HN stretches from sea to shining sea on my ultrawide.

You could just have your browser only take up half of your ultrawide monitor if you don't like it. That's what I do. You could have a second browser window in the other half as well.

Except that at the 690px? breakpoint, HN starts requiring horizontal scroll: https://ibb.co/FqWf3t1

Huh, I can't get it to do that even when shrinking the browser window to the minimum width.

That's what I do. I'm just kind of nitpickin

  > Funny, I find it quite hard to read, since it just blows posts out to nearly
  > full screen width.

Which reduces scrolling. I love it. If you don't, just resize your user agent. That's why it is referred to as a user agent, incidentally.

  > Humans read much better with wraps at 60-80 characters. The
  > first line of your comment, on my screen, is 196.

Then tell the humans to resize their user agent. The current site is now accessible to both us and to the humans, no need to change it.

Hot tip is to add custom CSS with something like the below, made it a so much better experience for me

      html {
        margin-left: 20vw; 
        margin-right: 20vw;
      }

HN doesn’t even restrict content width to readable limits, and uses color combinations that fail basic accessibility tests (eg OP text posts). Odd example of good design when it doesn’t even meet basic accessibility certification requirements. I do find HN design endearing in a minimalist 90s tech way, but that’s just social signaling.

Mostly it's #000000 on #828282 (light gray).

When things get downvoted (like your post was, for some reason), they become gradually more gray on gray, which is hardly accessible for everyone.

I think hn's display of downvoted posts intentionally degrades accessibility in an effort to discourage further interaction.

Yes but it also violates accessibility for OP text posts for other reasons

Yes, the intent makes perfect sense.

Less popular => less viewable is good UX.

But gray on gray does not degrade equally for all.

Some won't be able to see any of it, and others will have text readers that don't censor based on grayscale.

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