Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Visual Design for Hackers

news.ycombinator.com

31–32 of 32 posts

Re: Ask HN: Visual Design for Hackers

#31
post #30

I’m about to go to sleep, but I just want to drop a few of my favorite rules of thumb. (I love UX and constantly bitch about bad interfaces, FWIW.) - Visual hierarchies. Color theory. Understand both of these, and use them. - Don’t use the words “me” or “my” in your interfaces (with rare exceptions like “✓ remember me”, which is de-facto standardized) - Native controls/widgets give users lots of free platform-specifi…

- Always show a useful fallback for empty views. Preferably visually distinct and "subordinate" to actual content (e.g. centered gray text instead of left aligned black text).

- Try to minimize the impact of destructive actions and try to offer the possibility to rollback potentially dangerous actions. Make dangerous actions look dangerous (e.g. make delete buttons red).

- Think about visual distance and distraction, especially in flowing text. Columns look good, but forces the eye to scan for the start of the next column when reaching the end of the previous. Don't place two equally important things right next to each other, etc...

Re: Ask HN: Visual Design for Hackers

#32
I've been working since posting this and haven't had time to properly read or reply to your comments, but wow - some really fantastic stuff here, from some very respectable people. I am going to have a great time reading and exploring what people have said, once I get a moment to sit down...

It seems a shame that all this expertise be confined to the bowels of the HN news list (which isn't search engine indexed, right?) - would it be acceptable to make some attempt to compile it into a (properly referenced, ofc) blog post or something that the rest of the world can see? What do people think about that?

Thanks for your responses, I am very impressed.

Dan

Post reply on HN