Hacker News Reader

Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

Each product takes up one line and is maybe a dozen words of description. It's a non-problem.

It's an example of poor design; the font color and weighting draws the eye straight to the product names and away from the descriptions, which are the real meat of what the site has to offer.

Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.

The memory anchor is the product name though. I go back to PH often to find products I didn't have time to check out and to jump back into discussions, and the product name is the thing I'm looking for. I can find it in seconds, and I can also see how certain products have moved up the leaderboard in seconds. Sentences as the visual lead would greatly complicate that behavior, one I think is a primary one.

Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.

You could more or less have your cake and eat it too, if you align the site names and their descriptions in two floated columns, so it's still - fairly - possible to scan whichever column you prefer.

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