Ask HN: Please review our web app - User Interface Throwdowns | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review our web app - User Interface Throwdowns

ninjasandrobots.com

42 pointsnate23 comments

Polluting my Twitter feed with the votes from this is a total dealbreaker for me. Of everyone that follows me, only a small group of people read HN and will have heard of this. The rest of them are going to see some convoluted hashtags.

Is that your way of marketing this? It's not a bad idea in principle, but you're losing (1) non-Twitter users and (2) people like me who want to maintain their Twitter stream.

yep, heard loud and clear. we'll do something better around that

Just something quick we (the guys at Inkling: inklingmarkets.com) whipped up. I absolutely love the 37better projects and explorations of making a design better. Here was a good one I saw today: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/highrise.html

We thought we could use a site to help foster more of these redesigns and commentary around them. This is just "half a product", and was curious if anyone got any use out of it before we explore it further.

Potentially cool site, but I'd really like to see the voting handled on the site and the twitter integration optional. I dislike twitter and, for the moment refuse to use it on principle.

K, thanks for that, i debated about that too. I don't see it being too hard to have native comments and slurp in twitter posts.

It's probably overkill but the wordpress plugin that the backtype guys made is wonderful for reclaiming your comments.

http://www.backtype.com/home

Ouch, I shouldn't have sent you that twitter invite then. Sorry :-P

I actually have a twitter account that I set up when I had some potential work involving the twitter API. I refuse to actually use it though. I see twitter as contributing to degeneration in the quality of human communication. It mandates the very sort of short, low-quality messages that are discouraged here on news.yc.

Twitter is like the HN story titles, not the comments. It'll never be better than true communication.

But as a quick exercise, I tried to get your message down to 140 characters:

I have an account that I set up to use the API, but I refuse to use it out of wrk. Its just full of low-quality msgs that r discouraged @ HN

Generally I think people spend more time trying to fit what they want to say in those 140 characters, that it defeats the point of the length anyway (well the real reason is due to the SMS length, but the main idea of twitter was short messages, regardless of the limitations)

Perhaps human communication is evolving toward the use of highly compressed protocols. I won't pass judgement on that at this point.

Your compression of my message is probably as good as it's going to get, but it's lossy and takes longer for me to parse than the original.

The Twitter message it throws off when you click "Tweet my vote" is completely non-human readable to someone not familiar with the site. It almost looks like spam. You have room to make it more verbose, which could help with virality.

Also, since you're in Chicago, why the hell don't we ever see you guys out?

Agreed, that twitter message looks gross. And I wanted to keep it as short as possible so people felt comfortable adding their own message rather than just leave some redundant default text. Feel free to add a throwdown of what the default message should be? :) We'll think about it more over here too. Thanks for bringing it up.

I don't know why you don't see us :) We are pretty social.

"I voted for Robot for new versus old Yahoo. #nar #hashymchashyhash bit.ly/zombies" That's bizarre, yet descriptive, enough to invite a click. I'd say Ninja is old, Robot is new since you have old on left and new on right.

Pick a night. I'll get shitfaced with you. Ask the Pollers or Thomas or any of the other folks: it's how I roll.

I'm probably being unfair, but I want to "feel" the proposed interaction and the single picture + text does not do it for me. I know that people are proposing and not implementing a new interface but, to me, web interfaces hinge a lot on interactions.

Maybe if there was some way to storyboard an interaction, I'm not really sure.

Also, there should be some form of anonymous voting, I didn't feel like letting this thing onto my twitter.

I totally agree. Real html of the redesign is better than just looking at an image. You can add whatever link you want so when people click on the image of your design it can definitely go to a site where you created an interactive experience.

I should probably add a "click to see more of this design" or something since it may have not been apparent that you can see whatever else the poster wanted you to see.

Also noted about not wanting to use Twitter.

Thanks for the feedback!

We did something that would probably go well with your site for Evernote. Probably could stand a once over from a talented visual designer, but overall we're happy with the UX choices.

http://fictivekin.com/Evernote_Redesign_A_case_study_in_UX

Sweet, exactly. Feel free to throw that up there! http://ninjasandrobots.com/throwdowns/new

I think you also need to make it usable for people to ask for help redesigning a site. That's what I expected from the title 'User Interface Throwdowns' - I don't know how much use it would get.

> Who doesn't like ninjas AND robots? :)

Cowboys.

I think the traditional answer is pirates :O

okay, I don't know if I am alone in this, but whenever I see someone mention 37signal I think "Wannabe Fanboy Ruby-extremist" which is not good!

As for the design, its okay, but the site 'raison d'etre' is not obvious thought, you also could have used a better logo! or a logo!

pretty cool nate - is there anyway you can hook up mechanical turk to it and get some A|B testing out of it? or is that not the point?

hey man! been a long time. you raise an interesting point, and i have thought about it, but not very long and with no real conclusion. like even summarizing ryan singer's github nav redesign:

http://ninjasandrobots.com/throwdowns/2

he actually ends up with a couple explorations in there.

or like the new guy at 37s. here's his backback redesign too:

http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/backpack.html

and he's got a couple explorations in there too.

not sure what to do with that yet. not sure if its a do 1-many of after designs? people can now of course just create many new entries with the same before design over and over. obviously not the most efficient. still have to think about this one and see where it goes.

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