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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about why this website is using less than half of my window for content. I understand wanting some margins, but a third of my window on each side seems pretty egregious. At least it's centered though!

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Do you want them to add Subway Surfers in the sidebars? What would they display if there's nothing to display? This is such a weird criticism, do you think you want the text to use the full width? It would just be hard to read because of long lines, shorter lines are more comfortable

It's not like unused space results in some kind of waste, this is not paper, blank space is okay

> It would just be hard to read because of long lines, shorter lines are more comfortable

That's a pretty subjective view, and one at odds with literally every other website I can think of

That's actually pretty objective, long lines force you to move your neck and your eyes more which is more straining. I rarely read HN comments on my laptop because of the unreasonable line width, it feels much more comfortable to read on my phone

You're literally describing your own subjective experience. I can move my eyes all the way to each side of my screen with my neck stationary, and I don't feel strained. "Subjective" doesn't mean I'm saying you're wrong about your experience; I'm saying you're wrong about my experience, which you are.

It's a subjective view that a huge number of UX designers absolutely believe is 100% factual, unfortunately.

I've never run into another website using so little of my horizontal space before though, so I'm struggling to understand why this one is an outlier for me based on that explanation alone.

wrapping text at 55-75 characters per line is often recommended in digital typography by UX. research implies that an optimum length exists to maximize reading speed, and although it depends on many factors 55-75 is often parroted as a universal rule.

And here I am, comfortable with and prefering lines at or above 200 characters. Given how many other changes have been made in the name of UX that have been gone compleatly against what those letters stand for, I'll press X to doubt on that one.

To be fair, I read fairly quickly, so maybe this is true if you only read 100 words per minute or whatever.

Short columns aren't (only) about overall reading speed, it's about comfort.

When you're done reading a line your eyes must move back to the start of the next line. With short lines you can still fully see the end of the previous line so it's easy to locate. It's a lot harder to do with long lines.

I don't understand this logic. If I was uncomfortable using the entire width of my monitor, I would have gotten a smaller monitor instead. I find moving my eyes less annoying than moving my fingers to scroll; I often don't even rest my hand on my mouse or keyboard when reading, because I can use my hands for other things at the same time, or even just rest them somewhere else.

My point isn't that everyone will agree with me, but that all of these experiences are subjective. The only actually objective signal that the UI developer has is the width of the screen, so that seems like what should be used. Some amount of margin isn't unreasonable, but asserting that my display is "too large to be comfortable" is dogma, not science.

This doesn't reflect my own lived experience.

If only UX worried more about user preferences instead of coming up with these dogmatic rules. We can already resize the browser window if we want shorter lines.

I'm sure there's something going back to newspapers on this (though they would of course, fill multiple columns), but I can't help but suspect a lot of these UX studies are just predetermined to justify things like extra space on the margins for ads, "related content" distractions, and such things.

Personally, I always found those newspaper columns hard to read, you constantly have to jump back and forth and they break them into so many pieces you have to actively search along the page to see where the damn thing continues.

I've definitely never seen a newspaper that left over half of the page blank.

I didn't say it so clearly but that's what I meant when I said they fill multiple columns. The columns themselves are narrow but there are many of them. I wouldn't mind the narrow widths as much, although this site is excessive, if there was a multi-column layout that filled the window. A lot of the annoyance is needing to scroll.

> wrapping text at 55-75 characters per line

What happened to 80 ? Ok, 75 is "close enough", but 55 ?

80 is a terminal standard, 55-75 is UX.

Incidentally, the same parrots love eating ants, which is why they're okay with the awful squished up and narrow images the same column width allows for.

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