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Hacker News Redesign

taiyab.co.uk

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Re: Hacker News Redesign

#11

Post by shib71 »

Redesigning a popular site is a good way for up-and-coming designers to show off their skills - but it's important to consider the target audience and their priorities. Yes, HN users want speed, but mentioning page load times and moving on shows that you haven't really thought about that. We want to get into the meat of HN (which is the conversations) as fast as possible. Everything that gets in the way of that is bad.

1) Spacing - designers love adding extra space, and on first glance it looks beautiful. But too much space slows down browsing speed.

2) The numbered articles - more eye catching than the actual content. A user reading that page will have to spend concentration on not looking at the numbers.

3) The same with the bubbles around the comment counts and upvotes. Those values are important for HN readers - but not as important as the actual topic.

The design is less important than the content.

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#12

Post by SeoxyS »

I'm sorry, but this is a perfect example of the difference between design and eye candy. Often, people wonder why I spend $50,000 a year going to design school, when I can learn how to make things that are just as shiny by reading psdtuts.com.

The difference is that style is only skin-deep. It's superficial. It's an added bonus on top of design. Design, on the other hand, is the core of the product: how it functions. It's the soul: what story it tells.

Your redesign, while prettier, does nothing to improve the user experience, or to tell a story. Sure, it's easier on the eyes, but it's a much worse design, in that it makes the user experience worse. It's now harder to read: less information is on the screen. (11 story as opposed to 25, on my screen.) The information hierarchy within stories is less clear. The eye has to jump around more to get the secondary information (poster / point count / comment count / time posted). The flag functionality is simply gone…

You did a good job making it look better, and should be commended for that. But as for the design, try again.

PS: Take this as friendly critique. Take it in, learn what you can, try again. Rise, repeat. Don't be discouraged, but realize you have a long way to go. You'll get there!

--

Note: Check out this redesign, which I think is quite effective, and is installable as a extra stylesheet on the current HN code: http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Hacker_News-20120420-180413.png

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#13

Post by yellowbkpk »

SeoxyS wrote: post #12

I'm sorry, but this is a perfect example of the difference between design and eye candy. Often, people wonder why I spend $50,000 a year going to design school, when I can learn how to make things that are just as shiny by reading psdtuts.com. The difference is that style is only skin-deep. It's superficial. It's an added bonus on top of design . Design, on the other hand, is the core of the product: how it functions…

Some users (like me) simply don't have the ability to flag stories, so the designer might not know about that functionality.

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#14

Post by septerr »

There are other functional things with HN that need improvement. For instance, when you edit a comment, and hit update, you should be taken back to the post. Although I have to edit my comments to fix typos, maybe editing comments shouldn't be allowed at all?

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#15

Post by andrethegiant »

> I know Hacker News is all about fast load times and minimal bandwidth usage, hence the lack of much graphical work in the current version.

Actually, I believe that the simplified design of HN as it is currently helps ward off the typical Internet surfer looking for new links to click on. The last thing HN needs is to attract users who only post pictures of animals.

My single piece of design criticism for HN would be to provide a hi-res upvote triangle image (heck, why isn't it pure CSS?) for retina display devices.

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#17

Post by ekianjo »

Your design is nice but not very mobile device friendly. and theres no point in putting the post position in orange background, its unreadable/invisible.

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#19

Post by jerf »

astral303 wrote: post #5

Sorry, but I don't like it. I do like the top header and the color scheme in general. The texture in the header looks snazzy, in a good way. The space wasted by the listing of stories is very excessive. That's the meat and potatoes of the site, yet I see 10 stories in the first screenfold vs 24 now. Why dedicate so much space to the wide "XX points" label? Is it even clickable (why would it be?) Arguably upvoting a s…

"(IMO text is too tiny)"

I run HN at 3 CTRL-+s. It solves the problem, permanently in most browsers.

Re: Hacker News Redesign

#20

Post by illicium »

- The red list numbers are essentially glorified, distracting, bullets

- Why does "x Points" look like a button? The word "points" also does not need to be repeated for each item, or needs to be deemphasized in favor of the number.

- Comment links are all over the place and look like a river of grey blobs running down the page.

- Article titles need more emphasis than the previously mentioned elements

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