Hacker News Reader

I love the design of useit.com. To me its one of the best designed websites out there. By far. I hate most websites. I also like Hacker News. So im surprised to see you disliking useit. Jittery typography? What would be better? One giant block of uniform text?

How would you design useit?

View on HN

See the way essays are presented on paulgraham.com. The limited line width makes it very readable -- if useit.com was reformatted this way, the enormous amount of text would be overwhelming. The main problem with useit is that the way it is presented encourages you to not actually read it. To me, this indicates that there is something wrong with the information, or at least it should be a lot shorter.

He's writing to two audiences at the same time but favoring one over the other. The bold, etc makes it hard for readers to read, but since they are readers, they'll read anyway. If they can't read it, at least they'll skim.

He's writing for the skimmers, which happen to be some very large percentage of web users. But these articles are mainly just loss leaders for his books, full reports, and conferences, which are all media where people give full attention by design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com