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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing.

It's very pleasant to browse.

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It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back.

Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.

It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.

yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.

I'm discussing UI/UX, not the stack. The back button is... something else here.

I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.

UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation.

The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.

Performance is part of design in software, much like how button feel is part of industrial design, or fabric qualities are part of fashion design. But I also see what you mean, you were talking about visual design.

Thank you for somehow being the only person in this complaint thread to grasp that, lol

Loading and performance behind loading states are UI concerns, especially on a big distributed system like the modern web. Perhaps you allow native browser elements to provide that UI, perhaps customize it somehow, but a UI designer must consider how the page fills as data arrives. Do you do the ‘spinner hell’ thing? Keep it blank? FOUC? Show cache and update? These are primary UI concerns.

That load even affects the back button is very much part of the User Experience (UX) and immediately broke the illusion of being back in 1998.

Isn't responsiveness on input definitely a UX concern, and doubly so when it changes the feel of a common operation in a specific context?

I would say responsiveness is the number 1 most important UI property. At least for me.

The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.

I agree with this, also because of the following reason: Wow! A forum, that does not only show a white page, when having JS disabled! The usual current crop of forum software will not even render anything, if you don't allow 3 CDNs and some third party JS to run.

thanks! yeah it's definitely not COMPLETELY true-to-form because i still do think a lot of modern design works for a reason, but i appreciate the words!

that's actually one thing that I don't like about it. it looks like every other generic corporate website or Wordpress template, and certainly nothing like the forums I remember.

We should seek to improve what we had before without losing the spirit. There's nothing useful about recreating the look of old forums.

nothing useful about endlessly replicating the current design trends either.

Well it's maybe harsh to expect from new engine dev to invent an whole new original design on top of the new code.

Maybe the real question is does this engine provide easy and performant template management? (Site is currently down can't lookup now)

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