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Comment by james-bcn | Hacker News Reader

That website has a surprisingly boring design. I haven't looked at it in years, and was expecting some impressively clean and elegant design. But it looks like a Wordpress site.

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I read this comment before clicking, and wow, oh boy do I disagree! The information design is impressively straight-forward. I can see every feature of the site right away with no overload or distraction from the content. There's an intuitive distinction categorizing every page element and I know what everything does and how to get everywhere without having to experiment. The fonts, spacing, groupings, and colors are all nice looking, purposeful, and consistent.

I'm not exactly sure how you're using the word "boring" in this context. There are good kinds of boring and bad kinds of boring, and I think this is the good kind.

I'll be honest...I like it. Boring with easily readable content is far better than most of the other junk that is put forward nowadays...

What isn’t “clean” about it?

I’ve found it incredibly easy to navigate and digest its content. What more are you looking for?

It's clear, easy to read, and easy to navigate. I wish lots more of the web were as "boring" as this site.

yeah the site is bad, but not because it is boring, but because it should be even more simplified than how it is now. almost of the CSS "finishing touches" have something wrong with them. the content shifts on page load: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif bizarre dropdown button behavior: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif and i can go on and on. i don't feel this nitpick whining is unwarranted considering the site purports to be a leader in user experience.

Reading this made me realize just how much my priorities have changed over the course of my career. In the beginning, this is exactly the kind of thing I would absolutely never let pass, and I still am very keen to fix this kind of ugliness when I have the leeway. But nowadays, I'm ecstatic just to see something useful and not confusing or frustrating. These kinds of rough edges that give the user the impression of crappy software but don't materially harm usability have come to be second-order issues that I often don't even think about until larger problems have been fixed. Arguably what I've adopted is a form of pessimism.

Maybe you could do a CSS redesign of it ? You could even hold a contest on Twitter or on blogs to compare redesigns/relooking people are coming up with ?

That could be interesting.

You should see his old site.

I do have a soft spot for the very reduced design of that site and the sister site useit.com had in the early 2000s:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010516012145/http://www.nngrou...

https://web.archive.org/web/20050401012658/http://www.useit....

A redesign should not has been as brutalistic, but keeping the same spirit and personality.

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