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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

> with total disrespect for the user experience

Be careful not to confuse user experience with UI aesthetics and pages with padding.

The site where they put up this blogpost has less respect for user experience than the simple and functional website they called ugly.

I can't even read the whole post without registering and he has the nerve of calling other websites disrespectful.

recently I learned that reading the article through archive.is shows the whole content: https://archive.is/Eea8R

And a beautiful little extension [0] (I use the Firefox one) to click when you visit a page that you want to Archive.is or Wayback.

[0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

In FF reader mode works fine without any 3rd party extensions.

I thought what they called ugly was pretty clean.

I know the HN hivemind despises white space and padding and medium width paragraphs and deem them unneccessary and atrocious for some reason, but the design on the site is not that "functional" - on a window with width of 1035px or less, the main table moves all the way down below the filter column - I can imagine someone opening this with a tablet or something like that for the first time wondering where are all the articles until they scroll all the way down.

It works fine in landscape orientation on an iPhone SE if you zoom out to 50%.

I prefer to view websites like this as if my phone was a desktop, and I tend to hate it when that desire is fought by aggressive attempts to reflow everything into a “mobile” format with no way around it. So I think it’s better than many modern websites as far as usability goes.

I’m sorry but I’m just not going to switch off my orientation lock and turn my phone sideways just for a website to “work fine”. It’s 2024. I expect better

lol!

I only type that when something literally makes me laugh out loud. Thank you, this comment made my morning.

Apologies if this is wasn’t a valuable comment.

Earlier it didn’t occur to me that the comment about having to turn their phone sideways might not be sarcasm.

There's a lot of content you're just not going to be able to partake in then. Tables with more than 3 columns more or less just don't work in portrait mode.

Then don't. Just don't visit the site. No harm no foul. Nobody owes you a web site catered to your preferences.

I blame font sizes.

I think everyone but me is wrong and that my phone in portrait mode should be able to show at least 100 characters. The comment im replying takes up about an inch of vertical space, and is spread over six lines, one of which is blank and one is a single word.

This is larger than I find ideal but about the same as an average paperback novel. That said I need to twiddle a setting in Android developer options to get even this small. Maybe people want to loom at their phone without their glasses on? maybe less text seems "cleaner"?

This is my hill and I'll gladly die on it.

Lot of people out there buying enterprise hard drives on their tablets?

Or are these kinda of purchases most likely being made during work hours sitting in front of a nice screen?

1035 is really low resolution for a tablet. Held vertically a 2012 iPad and initial 2013 iPad Air are both 1536pix wide and 2048 tall.

Even a kid targeted 100$ Amazon fire tablet held horizontally is 1200 pixels wide these days.

Real pixels and css pixels aren't the same thing. As far as the website is concerned, the viewport is usually something like 400x900 even on the most expensive ultra mega hi res phone.

This gives you an overview: https://blisk.io/devices

You’re obviously correct. It’s odd, I haven’t dealt with CSS in long enough I’ve completely forgotten about that or perhaps like many CSS issues I have completely blocked it out.

Exactly my point as well when I went to the site. Fast, click here, uncheck there, kaboom, instant change. No gazillion nested divs, precisely to the point of what it says it does. I guess Peter Voica, the article's author, cannot comprehend pages without having blank spaces at edges.

If you really want to learn good modern UI design from a business perspective, you need to look at websites that absolutely need to retain users and depend on high conversions to survive.

Example: Stake.com. Somehow manages to show a ton of information without feeling slow or sluggish. Isn’t pretty but has basic respect for legibility and whitespace.

> He created a website that looks like it was made in HTML with total disrespect for the user experience

I find that the filtering on diskprices.com works way faster than the typical search filters on Newegg, Canada Computers, and pretty much every e-commerce site I've ever used.

Disk Prices is definitely respecting my user experience by being snappy and not wasting CPU cycles and network round trips.

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