Ask HN: Feedback on side-project Webdesignerd (an HN for webdesign)
webdesignerd.com
webdesignerd.com
A couple of potentially interesting design decisions:
* Points for both links and comments are hidden until after you vote
* Uses oAuth and OpenID exclusively (even though none of your personal info is displayed and you can still choose your username independently this may be a big turnoff -- but I also think it’s potential for keeping out spam could outweigh its potential drawbacks)
* Was contemplating creating a sense of scarcity by limiting signups to 10/20/whatever per day. Of course at the moment it wouldn’t matter either way, but could be an interesting way to drum up interest
Anyway, it’s just a side-side-project and may not appeal much to this crowd, but feedback is appreciated.
Of course its almost surely because I am so used to the HN simplicity and directness. But it is indeed hard to parse for me. Lists are very very friendly. I find myself being able to parse HN very fast, starting from the top left, reading each listed line until it loses my interest, and then proceeding. Very hard to do on your site since much of my effort is ignoring the design aspect and also the fact that I have to scan so wide horizontally does not help.
Much easier for my mind to know that each line is its own concept, and a newline refreshes the concept. With your box model, my mind has to consciously give meaning to the structure and boxes. Same thing for hierarchy. There is an assumed, implied, and very natural order with a list. Not so with your box model.
Perhaps I'm just thinking too much but for usability, your site gets a "too much effort." and I'd much prefer HN.
Of course as you may have guessed, I'm not a design guy. I can appreciate and love good design, but my take is that design should complement the goal in not only an aesthetic but utilitarian manner.
I feel there is just too much benefit in using the HN list model to go with anything else.
I just dislike how images look to the left of the text on Digg, Reddit, etc. so I wanted to try and break out of that a bit. But if it's unreadable it's unreadable.
Anyways, I highly recommend some books on cognitive ergonomics - it's a bit odd that we have a bunch of UX guys running around who don't even know what the term means.
It's generally understood that, for western countries anyways, people read content from top to bottom, left to right. When trying to present something in a skimmable, easily parsable way, you must stick with this format.
The somewhat flaky nature of your thumbnailing is also distracting. When presenting a list, the list must be consistent - and right now it is anything but. Behaviour and location of information radically differs between thumbnailed vs. non-thumbnailed entries.
No offense, but the move away from the top-down list seems driven more by an attempt to be different rather than any perceived gain in usability.
Nonetheless, the main page is a pretty gigantic violation of basic cognitive ergonomics tenets, and IMHO trades way too much usability for what I perceive as mere prettiness.
Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether - the thumbnail communicates nothing (usually it's a screengrab of a wall of text) and doesn't tell me anything about what I'm about to visit.
I don't disagree with you. I'm going to try and find the time to add a toggle b/n list view and grid view so the user can save their preference. Then if it seems that most use the list view, I might just make that the default.
> Also, I'm very skeptical of the usefulness of the thumbnails altogether
Thumbnails of designs are a pretty standard convention with "design gallery"-type sites (http://cssremix.com, http://www.unmatchedstyle.com, etc). It's meant to do nothing more than give you a small idea of the site you're about to visit. The only alternative would be listing the site's title or URL and that certainly wouldn't be any more helpful.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Despite all of this, though, it is a good idea and a good start. I hope it works out.
Agreed, I was going back and forth between making sure the article text didn't get overwhelmed by the screenshots and vice versa.
You also have some errors in your html ( http://vldtr.com/?key=webdesignerd.com ). Especially the double use of id="header" could lead to some unexpected behaviour at some point. And don't forget to encode & as &
Also, when choosing a username there is no way to cancel the action and return to the main page (ie clicking off the dialog or maybe having a cancel button.)
That said, the signup process was really smooth and painless. Congrats!
> when choosing a username there is no way to cancel the action
That's actually intentional so that users can't post or comment without a username. But I should add helper text to explain that.
Below, jlees suggested splitting out the design and the news sections. I think that'd help. The grid layout you currently have for the whole site would work fine for the design section, and then I'd do news the same way HN does (why re-invent the wheel?). If you look at the HN homepage, it doesn't take more than 1/2 the width of the browser (or in the cases it does, links could be truncated/wrapped). You could have the news/design sections side by side on the homepage. The split alone would help me decide where I should spend my time.
I think part of the confusion might stem from the fact that points are hidden until after you vote, so I'll have to think on that one.
As for the idea - great! I already found a few points of interest and that's just from scanning the front page.
I like how you follow HN's lead and make read content headlines a lighter gray. But there's no corresponding effect for the screenshot slides. That definitely reduces the usefulness of the read state.
EDIT: Correction, not "have", rather "support"
On some sites, I've used it as a subtle hover state for image links, so they "pop" a little. (Set the default opacity to 92% and have it go to 100% on hover.)
I got a little overloaded looking at it; but I'm also not a designer.
I think the site looks nice... just a little overwhelming.
Re: overwhelming - Yeah, I agree, I've tried to keep everything toned done as much as possible, but there's probably still too much visual noise.
Hopefully you can attract a healthy designer community there - one of the things that seems like a recurring theme around here is that there are very few designers in this crowd. I can think of maybe 2 or 3.
Yeah, the user just needs to submit the URL and it'll be screenshotted, the idea being to post nice designs and talk about them.
http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer/
which I personally find pretty readable. But the appeal of that experiment is probably due to the fact that it's less busy than Webdesignerd, so I'll work on that.
Since your audience are front-end designers and developers, they like to look at pretty things. The Hacker News crowd strives for functionality.
whats it built on?