Hey, HN. I put a lot of time and thought into this GUI. I'd love some feeback. | Hacker News Reader

Hey, HN. I put a lot of time and thought into this GUI. I'd love some feeback.

voltagecreative.com

14 pointswmeredith26 comments

The color contrast on the non-bolded blue text seems off and tends to hurt my eyes in FF3.

Otherwise it's pretty easy to figure out what the site is supposed to do.

The three sentences in the box at the top are there to explain what the site's all about, right? They're important. They're also too long, and much of the text is pure padding.

Sentence one: "Select a topic below to listen in as the most vocal community of first-adopters in the world talks design."

What is this 'most vocal community of first-adopters in the world'? I'm confused!

Sentence (or rather non-sentence) two: "Often a provider of insight on tomorrow's headlines—occasionally of no use at all—always good* with morning coffee…"

What's the missing referent here? What is a provider of insight? Now I'm really confused, plus my sense is that this is just self-promotion rather than useful information, so I'm annoyed as well.

Sentence three: "Design Aviary displays the latest 99 Twitter entries relating to a variety of design topics; is updated every 10 minutes."

Oh, I get it! Why did I have to read all that other stuff before you told me what the heck is going on here?

Axe the first two sentences, and fix the grammar in the last one.

Done. I really like those other two lines though, but they obviously need some work. I killed them for now.

I'm rather fond of the low-light version. I wish more sites had such a feature.

Agreed...very slick. I'd almost make that the default view.

when I switched to the low-light version my eyes applauded! looks very nice and the colors are in a very good combination.

regarding the standard version of the page, me and my eyes think that the blue-like color is not the best choice combined with the much smoother gray tones.

all told, I pretty much like the idea and the realization as a whole. keep it up!

Thanks. I thought it was an important feature to offer designers who might spend a lot of time in front of computers at all hours of the day. This hit me at about 11pm one night while I was working on the site and the white was killing me.

On the other hand, the "bright mode" is great in my office which has three massive windows. (I don't have some awesome corner office. I work in a loft space with 4 other designer/developers and one end of the room has three floor-to-14-foot-ceiling windows.)

I love the low-light version too, but there's just one problem - when switching between the tabs on the bottom, the page does a full reload, and it sometimes flashes white before the JS kicks in and turns it back to black. Sudden flashes of white when your eyes are relaxedly looking at a near-black page is .. jarring.

To alleviate it somewhat you could make the tab changes AJAXy, or serve a different CSS file based on the choice .. or if you didn't want to persist user information server-side a nice compromise could be making the page bg colour #888 and then explicitly set up or down in the JS.

On Chrome the font on the category tabs is nearly not readable, Firefox displays the same font ok.

I like the initial presentation -- it's very clean and focused. But when you click on the tabs/areas at the bottom, I have no idea what all that data is.

Perhaps it's just not aimed at me (that's probably a large part of it), but I had no idea what was going on there. Is there a way to contextualize it somehow or format it?

Ignore if I am just not getting it. But I do like the "Return to Top" button at the bottom.

Users "not getting it" seems like a bad thing to ignore. Did the welcome note not explain the site well? Or did you skim past it and go for the tabs?

I skimmed it and went for the tabs. A bad habit of mine, but a lot of users do this, too, I'd guess. It's a good idea, though, I think.

I'd like it if switching between the tabs was handled via Ajax, rather than a full request. The good part is that you've done things right and built it without Ajax to begin with, so you can just Hijax (http://domscripting.com/blog/display/41) the links.

Edit: The "Return to top" link could also be a link to an anchor, rather than a link to the current page's URL.

The tabs (Inspiration, Gigs & Works, etc.) stair step down in IE7.

Edit: The second time I visit I'm getting a blank page too.

I would show less tweets as no one can read 99 of them. If you must, have a more button like HN has.

The most important thing is putting the best tweets at the top -- basically it is a search/aggregation website, so your choice of what to show is what will differentiate you.

Love the low-light switching feature.

Automatically loading more when you reach the bottom could be a nice touch, as Slashdot does.

I could play with the low light switch all day. Love the transition effect.

I just get a blank white screen on IE6 (at work). I don't know if that's considered a good thing or a bad thing!

(And believe me, if they would let me use something other than IE6, I would.)

Haha. That's a bad thing. Considering the site's target audience is web designers and graphic designers I really didn't even debug for IE 6. I did however at least look at the site in IE 6 and it was terrible, but something was still there. Hmmm... I'll have to look into that.

It may be due to whatever messed up install the corporate IT people have deigned to give us.

It's working for me on IE6. The tabs switch back and forth rapidly on mouseover in the wrong location, but otherwise it appears ok, I think.

Edit: Wait, are the tabs supposed to descend from the box, rather than sit flush against it? If not, that's also off in IE6...but it is IE6.

I think it looks good. I'd keep the OPTIONS panel open since it's not taking up a lot of space and make it's a little more obvious what the purpose of the page is.

The character separating the date and username (♒ if it shows up here) looks a lot like equals to me, and confused me for a while. Just a small weirdness.

It's nice, but the site requires horizontal scroll on my small browser window on my MacBook screen. That's my biggest complaint, really.

When you have tabs(options/welcome in your case), it might be a good idea to visually indicate which is the current tab.

The back-to-top button is the first of its kind I actually used without fear that it would not work somehow.

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