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Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?"

What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

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Just view it in Print mode instead:

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compar...

>Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system

I agree! I hate their navigation UI. In general drop downs should only be used for familiar lists (counties, states, etc.) However, some of their articles are very detailed and has numerous pages and they need to provide a quick access to individual pages. One work around is to provide a simple "Next >>" at the bottom of the article. It would make it a lot less confusing.

There are forward and backward links at the bottom of each section.

That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up pageviews, and thus generate more revenue.

Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/next buttons.

There are previous/next buttons on each page, labeled with the title of the preceding or following page.

Well, I feel like most of these hardware sites have pretty meaty pages so it's not terrible that they split up their articles, as otherwise they'd be very long pages. Especially Anandtech, some of their reviews are 15-20 pages long - I wouldn't want to read that in one go. Though sometimes I just stick their articles in Pocket and read it that way on my phone, so maybe I'm just rationalizing a practice that I've just grown accustomed to over the years.

This is pretty much standard on hardware benchmarking and review sites. I'm not saying that it's a good design, but it's not unique to this site.

It really needs to pop more though. I noticed the links to the top-left and top-right of the select and really wondered why they aren't forward/back arrows. They could at least have chevrons.

I actually prefer it greatly to either the never ending scroll or the digit-based pagination (1, 2, 3, Next, etc) wherein I cannot tell what's on page 3 or page 4. Often I just want to go to the summary, or to just view GPU info. I like it.

Note that a lot of the best info is actually in the user comments anyway. Some of the arguments there are very enlightening, and uncover good points that the article didn't touch (even if you look at all the pages, the article was pretty brief and short on analysis).

It's really bad in mobile browsers.. a thin gray line, very easily missed

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