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Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

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Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was a "Feature preview" option where you could ask users and the community what they think about design changes before they go live. Oh wait you have that. You just rolled it out for a couple of weeks basically to see if there were any showstopper bugs before you went live. I don't expect companies to take on my feedback. I do expect them not to treat it like it's a joke.

To follow on, many of us felt this was rushed through and that our feedback was not heard. You can sense the frustration in the parent to this comment. You destroyed much of the trust I had. Will you roll this back and reconsider after talking more of your user base?

Agreed, I gave feedback but no use. I am not wasting my time when they’re not going to even bother listening to my feedback. I am out of the previews, not doing your QA for free.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#492
post #126

I submitted feedback over it but, aside from the over-reliance on rounded corners, and making pills and buttons hard to separate, the single worst change is that you can't see the latest commit status from the repo screen. Instead, you get the commit hash, and have to click a tiny ellipsis button to get the commit message and the status indicator. When I'm browsing on github and not using git directly, the commit sho…

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.

There are bugs in IE 11 (which has 5.88% usage on desktop according to NetMarketshare and is still supported by MS) - dropdown buttons and other interactions do not work due to JS errors:

    SCRIPT1053: Const must be initialized
    SCRIPT1014: Invalid character
    SCRIPT1010: Expected identifier
    SCRIPT1003: Expected ':'
Please fix them.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential comment: I just opened the link with the new design on my phone and it was a delight to look at compared to whatever I saw last time. I think the design changes were made keeping in mind smaller screens, which might be what the user data suggested (how am I to know). But I agree with other comments that the top bar content could be aligned with the rest of the content. Stretching it to each end is causing…

Surprisingly, most of us don't edit code on our phones.

Most of us don't use GitHub to actually edit code, either. E.g., some projects are using their GitHub repo as the homepage, so I sometimes end up on GitHub on my mobile phone, too.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#494

Aside from the accessibility concerns -- which is honestly inexcusable -- the non-centered repo layout is so strange to me: All that info that's now in the sidebar is temporary. All of it. I never need to look at a project language more than once. However, it takes up 100% of the height of the page, so when I'm halfway through a README, the README gets offset by some magical space. The ghost of the 1 paragraph of "la…

I don't like any part of the update but this is by far my biggest issue with it.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#495

For me it is a bad and unnecessary rework. Exactly the kind where they break a functional design that was refined for multiple years. And they break it just for a product management/ marketing reason to have 'something new'. Both on desktop and mobile there are a lot of useful info lost and at the same time, low density and a lot of empty space. But in addition there is no coherence. For me, the mobile experience is…

For a fun test, I showed my GF the 2 screenshots. I tried to avoid involuntary giving any clue, and asked her which one, she was thinking was the old interface and the new one. She is not a geek, not in tech, and does not know Github.

But, you can bet it, her guess was that the NEW interface was the oldest one, and that the OLD one was the recent rework...

That is an interesting test to rule out the fact that we are "adverse" to changes.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#498

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 believe for eyesight it's important to change focus, i.e. the distance of the object you're looking to. Not sure if just moving your eyes help but looking up from the screen into the distance is certainly good for the eyes.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

#500
post #134

Lots of hate here. I probably don't use GitHub as much as others here, so I can understand that any change adds friction and people are going to hate that. Having said that, I'm comparing using the Wayback Machine: new: https://github.com/torvalds/linux old: https://web.archive.org/web/20200619163555/https://github.co... and I can't find it in me to dislike the changes they've made. They've removed the double repo na…

That might be an unpopular opinion, but I loved the double repo navbar.

I've discovered the redesign when I wanted to check the latest commits of a git project I haven't cloned yet.

My very first reaction was "oh, there's a CSS issue" while Ctrl+F5 the page, then opening it in a private window to see if one of my extensions somehow broke the page.

Then it took me a full minute to find the link to the git history, while my eyes basically searched in every corner of the screen.

I really loved the old GitHub UI, it made GitHub a better product (in my opinion) than GitLab. And I really didn't like the experience I had while trying the new one.

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