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The Death of Personality (2017)

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Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#61

Post by andirk »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

The internet c. 1995-2005, and probably before, was lacking in fun design but was so straight forward that I miss it, save for constant pop-ups. Websites like Craigslist, Wikipedia, HN, are a few of the last bastions of content over pretty.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#62

Post by prox »

lvxferre wrote: post #57

I just wrote about this in my blog. I'm lazy so I'll copypaste it here. _______________ Linguists already understood a long, long time ago that redundancy is not a bug, it's a feature; it's what allows you to decode a message even if you don't get it fully. I feel like interface designers should’ve understood the same already. Sleep-deprived, with poor sight, not tech-savvy enough to get it right, using a non-native…

At every turn I promote the book “About Face : On Interaction Design” because for sure most app teams haven’t read it. There is a rhyme and rhythm and reason why some things work and others do not. Every day I could make a list of fallacies in interaction: and this is coming from the top dogs such as Apple and Google to small programs and websites, there is still so much to improve. There is still lots of room to innovate as well!

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#63

Post by tannhaeuser »

redelbee wrote: post #16
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

> The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens.

I think it's fair to add that links/menu items/buttons are generally too small and close to each other on touch devices.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#64

Post by redelbee »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #23
redelbee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

> I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. Such a cool-sounding job! Any fun stories to share from those days? > Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN. Agreed. I always browse HN in a window that's half the width of my monitor. There is something nice about the ultra-simplistic CSS that goes as wide as your window, though. Then, the user can just resize the…

It was a cool job until the newspaper business imploded.

I have yet to experience anything even remotely close to the buzzing productivity of a newsroom minutes before the press deadline. Election nights were always fun because all the information was coming in later so we had to scramble. Obviously we knew about the time constraints beforehand so we could plan for it to the best of our ability, which of course usually fell to the curse of best laid plans.

I’m nostalgic for slower paced information flow and newspapers remain a near-perfect example.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#65

Post by dTal »

k__ wrote: post #41
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

HN could use a serious mobile update. All links and buttons are freakishly small.

Freakishly small buttons are uncomfortable on desktop too.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#66

Post by soundnote »

flax wrote: post #9

Google has recently screwed this up too with Material You where every single icon looks basically the same. App icons should be distinct. They are there for you to recognize the app! Monochrome and uniform shape does not help with this.

It's funny, the new Google icons are literally using disruptive camouflage.

If you're drawing shapes, why the fuck do you intentionally break them? Shape-breaking is the exact thing animal and military camouflage do to make animals and humans less recognizable in the environment. And Google applies it to something they want to be spottable.

@mcclure111 used a colorblind filter on them and they look better, as expected, because the shapes get broken less.

Google basically failed Design 101.

https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1313541935022342144

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#68

Post by 29083011397778 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #63
redelbee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

> The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. I think it's fair to add that links/menu items/buttons are generally too small and close to each other on touch devices.

That's a feature, not a bug though. Similar to an on-by-default no-procrastination mode.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#69

Post by k__ »

dTal wrote: post #65
k__ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN could use a serious mobile update. All links and buttons are freakishly small.

Freakishly small buttons are uncomfortable on desktop too.

Now, at least for me, the reply buttons are freakishly big on desktop.

I approve!

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#70

Post by crazygringo »

userbinator wrote: post #36
crazygringo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...no? I have lots of tabs open, and every other site I use chooses a legible width. You think I'm going to resize my browser window narrower every time I switch to HN, and resize it wider every time I switch to a different tab? Sites are designed. Legibility is part of design. Appropriate characters per line is part of legibility. Full stop.

You think I'm going to resize my browser window narrower every time I switch to HN, and resize it wider every time I switch to a different tab? Or you could just put it in a separate window of the desired width; maybe then you'd even have enough space on your huge monitor to see several sites all at once! As I wrote the post above, I had about a dozen different windows open, all of varying sizes. Monitors have gotten…

Why the heck would I want to put HN in a separate window instead of with the rest of my tabs? I only want one browser window, I'm not going to change my workflow to accomodate a single badly designed site, nor should I have to.

(Nor do I have a huge monitor, I'm on a laptop...)

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