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Comment by rckrd | Hacker News Reader

Just from a UX perspective, I wonder what seems like a more natural ordering:

  [ 1 2 ]
  [ 3 4 ]

Is more natural to read than:

  [ 1 3 ]
  [ 2 4 ]

I would think that since we read from left to right and then down, that the standard matrix ordering row, then column, might be more preferable.

Yet, horizontal scroll plays a larger role in metro, so this might not be a bad idea. I'd love to hear from someone who knows anything about UX in regards to this sort of thing.

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As a user, scanning a 2D array of tiles feels like work. I think this might be part of the reason: if I don't remember how a particular app or page is laid out, I have to scan both ways and decide which way makes more sense.

Maybe a single convention could emerge per mobile platform, but across the entire web, I doubt it, and honestly, my biggest problem with 2D grids is that scanning every item systematically feel very unnatural, and I doubt I will ever break that habit. Decades of reading has led me to see me to see Roman text as coherent, directed strings, and lists also naturally elicit in-order scanning behavior for me, but 2D grids of squares or rectangles are used for things that require different scanning behavior. When I look at maps, board games, and color or fabric samples, for example, I tend to hop around looking for patterns among groups of tiles, combined with occasional breadth-first scanning outward from points. My first reaction to a 2D grid is never to systematically scan all individual items but to start jumping around impressionistically, and then to switch to a systematic scan if the impressionistic method fails. Naturally, switching provokes irritation, both at myself and at the situation.

I wonder if the experience is different for people who grew up reading Chinese.

This is, in my opinion, the single largest problem with tile matrices that have unrestricted length and width. Its very hard to tailor the reading experience to be anything better than mediocre -- and at times on short, wide screens, its downright awful. Windows 8 makes a mess of things by scrolling sideways in landscape mode, then up and down in portrait mode. Readability is sacrificed at the alter of adaptable design. The tiles lead the eyes no where -- because content can really go in any direction (up down left right? why not down through 3D or even up or spinning maybe too? They are all done in Windows 8)

The other thing tiles do poorly is constrain the variances on line lengths by boxing them in. When you scan headlines, you naturally grip the page using the various headline lengths. Boxing them in and cutting them off makes every headline appear the same length and kills their distinguishability (and implied reading direction).

Ultimately, I believe its most comfortable read across the most narrow dimension of a screen -- depending on orientation -- then scroll the opposite of the reading direction.

That being said, users will also tend towards their native reading direction (Japanese users will read down, English, readers across from left to right, Arabic from the right to left)

Discloser: Im a UX and UI designer who has worked on Windows 8, iOS, Android, and about 10 other operation systems. I have also designed mixed language or language-free interfaces to varying success.

Given the way most things in Windows 8 scroll sideways rather than vertically (at least in the tile-based UI things like the store, or Netflix), having things ordered in columns rather than rows will be a more intuitive ordering of stories than orienting them in rows.

On a side note, I was dismayed to notice that the "App website" link led to Quixby's "coming soon" screen, which is probably not terribly helpful for users who might want to know more. However, this is fairly well mitigated by the excellent selection of screenshots showing different use cases. The only question I couldn't answer from reading the in-store details was whether it would allow me to log in and up-vote stories and comments, since I consider that an integral part of my usage of HN.

However you can see that this app, in fairly typical Metro style, scrolls across to the right. I can't think of any nice ordering horizontally that allows for that without constraining you to individual screens, like

[1 2 5 6 ] [3 4 7 8]

Is this possible to change to the scrolling direction to up and down only? It would then feel more like reading a newspaper and also work well with HN's scoring system.

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