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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. Your UI is much better than the one on the site. There are two problems there:

1. The vertical text is difficult to read despite its size, because it's vertical.

2. When we click on it a large part of the text disappears below the bottom margin of the page.

Problem number 1 is not so bad but the combination with 2 kills the UX. The text in the clicked bar should appear somewhere on screen, horizontally.

Edit: if anybody like me wonders what's Zippy its a C++ compression library from Google. It's called Snappy now [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(compression)

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1. I didn't expect people to have such a negative reaction to sideways text. It doesn't bother me personally, but it seems some people really can't work with it. I'll likely avoid it in everything else I do going forward.

2. I feel a big part of the problem here is that it's not obvious how to get it back once it's gone. I could certainly try making the text visible after the bar is gone.

I guess the most readable form would be a static logarithmic plot with colored dots/bars and a legend in the corner (or on tap/hover). Everyone interested in these numbers likely knows how to read it.

Point 1, we're used to sideways text because of books on a shelf but here it's compounded by the text almost disappearing after the click. The only way to get it back is clicking multiple times in the empty space above the bar. The only hint to click there is in one of the steps in the text box on the left, which probably nobody reads. Something to click above the bar (an arrow up?) would probably remove the need for the help text. Other hints could remove the need for any help text and free the box to display the content of the clicked bar.

It seems like there's some potential here, but not quite nailed yet.

I'd already seen cost model numbers like these before, but this interactive visualization still seemed to obscure the information as I was taking a first look.

I wonder whether it would be more useful adapted to a visualization/calculator for specific numbers, maybe for multiple operations in an algorithm, and the alternatives for implementing each? (And the click-to-scale is for selecting N for each operation, and maybe somehow constants?)

FWIW I don't mind the sideways text, but the ant's-eye-view histogram is one of the strangest user experiences I've had in data science.

Not to diminish your art or anything, but if you just want to present some numbers, a <table> with two columns is fine. We can infer scale.

The table already exists, it’s linked to on what I made. I wanted to try and remix it a bit :)

I disagree. Nano vs mili vs micro is not in the least intuitive compared to seeing how much longer something is.

That’s why we have graphs and charts in the first place.

My intuition was that scrolling would increase the y-axis maximum. (Effectively, scrolling would “zoom out”)

And that scrolling horizontally would pan me through the content.

Browsing on mobile, I should clarify.

But I’ll add that I also got the hang of scrolling back “in” fairly quickly. After I had zoomed out a couple times, then finally stopped to read the instructions.

Mmm.. you could rotate both text and bars, right? Like, horizontal bars.

It also has very poor contrast. I can turn my phone on the side to read the vertical text but the white text is impossible to read on the yellow and orange backgrounds.

On an iPad most of text is obscured and I can’t read some of the bars in landscape or portrait mode. The sideways text is also hard to read.

Another problem is that on low resolution screens (or small browser windows) the boxes on the top left hide the text on the bars behind. I had to zoom out to 50% for it to be readable, which then put other bars behind the boxes.

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