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Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

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Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#451

Post by hackerman123469 »

tarboreus wrote: post #419
natfriedman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback about the latest commit status. This is something we should definitely fix. Also – I don't think there is a principle of lowering information density at work here. I think it's just a design that we will keep iterating. We are pro information density at GitHub.

Really hate the second column on the right, which for a long README or documentation does nothing but make it so that there's less room for the text. I frequently use GitHub to store and read notes or to create larger docs, this essentially kills my desire to do any of that and makes me want to move what I have. The information in that column is also extremely low value.

Not only that but it also feels like everything is floating left. (Which it is but when there's nothing on the right scrolling down it looks out of place.)

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#452

Post by gnur »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #441
h3ll0k4ll3 wrote: post #435

The design before was targeting developers with a "for work" feel. From a vcs perspective and ci/cd perspective it showed the important stuff. The new file browser is especially bad - being Tritanopia color blind the lack of lines and the folders physically hurt my eyes. But To be honest we all know what this re-design is for. Microsoft pushing Azure Pipelines ( github actions ). The previous github interface was not…

What is an action? And is there really much risk of us using Azure? My code, like most I suspect, runs on linux/unixy things and probably doesn't even build on Windows.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that at least 50% of the vms running in Azure are actually running linux.

And in this case, "action" refers to the ci/cd tooling github provides called "github actions". It's one of the tabs at the top.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#454

Post by tasuki »

wonderlg wrote: post #388
saltcured wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, to me it is an improper max width. My biggest peeve with the GitHub web UI is the squished center pane. I hate that it centers it with giant gutters wasting over half the width of a 4K monitor, should I choose to maximize a browser window. I'd much rather see everything shifted to the left. I'd even be OK with some soft margin still causing regular README text to wrap at a typical width. But, if there are long co…

Sorry but do you use full screen windows on a 4K monitor? I doubt any website is really designed to fill anything more than ~1400 horizontal logical pixels.

I do. In the age of various resolutions and screen sizes and css frameworks, websites can and should be designed to look reasonable on any number of horizontal logical pixels. If it isn't supposed to be wider than 1400px, that's what css's `max-width` is for.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#455

Post by hackerman123469 »

bconnorwhite wrote: post #259
mixologic wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low information density means "less clutter" for somebody new to the interface, but it means "many more steps" to provide all the information that a dense design allows for. So much design fails to take into account human expertise, and our ability to learn complex interfaces. They get the A/B treatment which optimizes for beginners, which always leans towards the simpler, easier design. This is why we'll never get a…

Excel today is still cleaner than Excel 2010, and Google Sheets easier to use than both. Most spreadsheet users simply don't need the extra functionality Excel provides, and the few users that do need this use the product enough to have memorized the keyboard shortcuts.

Yes that is true for Excel but that is not true for Github.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#457

Post by nmfisher »

risyachka wrote: post #418
nmfisher wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just logged into GitHub, freaked out when I saw the redesign, and came straight here to say exactly this. It's unnatural eye movement to look wide for platform navigation, then narrow for README/repository navigation. This is outright bad design. There was nothing wrong with GitHub's UI before, it was probably the closest thing to "perfect" I'd ever encountered. Alongside that incredibly irritating "navigate to code…

Genuinely curious here - isn't it better for eyes to move more? Can moving in unnatural way be a good thing considering most of the time they move naturally? Like a sort fo stretching.

I don't mean it's literally bad for your eyes - there may well be benefits to constantly shifting your gaze/focus/etc. I can't comment on that.

I'm talking about "natural" eye movement being a well-known design principle. This means that eyes very naturally follow a Z pattern that doesn't exceed the periphery of your focus. So if you load up a fresh page, your eyes will naturally look top left -> top right -> bottom left -> bottom right, bounded by your standard viewbox (which is about 800px-1200px wide at 96dpi and 1-2ft, the standard distance most people sit from their monitor). So you usually stick your most important information along that pattern. Anything outside this boundary requires an extra "look", which means a slight hesitation/delay on the part of the user. That's not to say the space is unusable, just that you put your most common/important features/information along this flow.

It's also not an ironclad rule, but it does work very well. When I went to the old GitHub, my eyes always followed the same pattern: repository name (top-left, to make sure I was on the right page), account (verifying that I'm logged in), branch, clone/download, then file list or more commonly, the README (bottom-left). It was a very quick, natural way to navigate a random GitHub page.

Now, I literally have to move my head to do this. The weighting also feels completely unbalanced, like there's too much information on the left it's all slanting in one direction.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#458

Post by beshrkayali »

On a 3840x2160 res it looks horrible, extremely stretched and honestly it looks like someone's first web design, and if you zoom in it looks unbalanced.

There's no reason for the major layout change.

Sadly, this seems like yet another case of designers/project-managers having nothing to do and wanting to feel useful every once in a while so they go about redoing the design. Paypal, slack, spotify, and many others do it all the time it, so why not github.

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