231–240 of 354 posts
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Hacker News is guilty of exactly this on downvoted posts.
The low contrast text? You realize that this is a feature?
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Oddly enough, Reddit becomes much more usable with RES and keyboard navigation. It's primarily a consumption site, which makes the ability to expand images inline and navigate with the keyboard very valuable. The vanilla experience where you're constantly linking off to other heavy-weight sites and frequently reloading the reddit page when you come back (a trend I wish modern web browsers would burn) is rather negati…
I use RES, but I hate most parts of it. Have you ever compared the page load times of reddit with and without RES? It's horrific. And adjusting the settings? they have search functionality for the settings because there's so many settings. The only things I use from RES are the account manager and the subreddit manager. I hate the never ending reddit with a burning passion, and don't even get me started on the highli…
It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything t…
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Most designers are frankly awful at typography. I would argue most design elements on a page can be simply removed if they properly used hierarchy of text to call out important areas for example.
Sure just like you don't need insane convoluted frameworks with a billion dependencies to develop 99% of the web-apps out there yet thats what most developers end up with. This is about self-expression and it's a small price to pay (and easily fixable by just forcing your own style sheet) for getting a vibrant and diverse jungle of content and ways to express it. The rest we can deal with.
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> Meanwhile, much of the web is now dominated by sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, etc - all of which are extremely readable. The author actually calls out Google and Apple specifically, for breaking their own contrast suggestions His example: https://kevinmarks.github.io/appenginebefore.png https://kevinmarks.github.io/appengineafter.png
I actually find the 'after' example an improvement for legibility - something about the spacing I think is the improvement; I don't find the colour a noticeable disadvantage at all.
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Not saying this is always the case but I wonder if, in some of the cases, this is what makes it hard for designers to get accepted in open source: the fact that many of the developers are also users and as such are pretty opinionated while the designers that come to open source might often be very eager to "set their mark" on something?
I doubt there are many designers working on OSS who don't also use it. I' even doubt the premise that there are terrible open source UIs created by designers. The vast majority of OSS GUI apps were probably styled by programmers, and I think they proved quite well over last 20 years that they chose well when not becoming designers. The problem with design is also that it doesn't work very well in the "bazaar" style o…
Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…
I mean, I can read that. On anything. Compared to most of the modern half-grey stuff, it's excellent.
Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…
The usability issues compound when that page was created with 1.2MB of JS (and another 2MB of ads), and I have to see a loading spinning wheel when it could have been easily been static content. ...And then when the page loads, I accidentally click an ad instead of a link because the ad moved over the content that I was reading to offer me 10% of joining the exclusive mailing list.
I deliberately set it to allow the bing/google ads and the analytics, but I'm not allowing everything under the sun.
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I have no idea where to look on that page (meaning the Drudge Report website). Maybe once you're "used to it" it becomes easy to parse but I've just spent a minute looking at it and I'm not even entirely sure what the site is about? It's compared to mainstream news sites so is it meant to be a news site? For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" What does that even mean?
> I have no idea where to look on that page Everywhere? It's a page full of selected news headlines. You're not supposed to look at some particular place (except the big letter, highlighted few headlines that are presented as the most important), just to check which ones you want to open. So, not totally unlike the first page of HN. > For example the main headline right now is "TONIGHT: HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP!" Wha…
The front page of HN is a single list with headers at the top of the page and a footer at the bottom. It is a numbered list which shows me the title of the article, #votes, #comments, the domain name, who submitted it and the time since posted. At the bottom of the page there is an FAQ to explain to me what the page is if I've never been there before. Even if I've never heard of it before the title "Hacker News" gives a good indication of what it is.
The drudge report has none of that. What are the three columns? Why is there a single column of content above that? How is the content divided / presented, is it just random? How fresh is the content? Where do the links lead? Are the links user submitted or is it run by someone? There is precisely zero context on who the page is by or what the site is. In addition, in the few places where I am given a picture for context which is clearly linked to a story I can't even click on the image to take me to the story.
Baffling that someone could think this is a well designed site.
Edit: After searching on Wikipedia to discover what the Drudge Report actually is I'm still far from impressed. For an example of what I'd consider to be a good "aggregation site" here is one http://www.jimmyr.com/
There is a reason for this. I happen to have an almost brand-new LCD screen here with LED backlight and high resolution, and a low-resultion over-a-decade-old LCD screen. And guess what? A website that looks totally fine on the old one is so blindingly bright on the new one that it hurts. It literally hurts to look at. This can be useful, as it provides a higher dynamic range, which can be used to recreate the blindi…
I turn my brightness and contrast down to sane levels, which means pure black on white/white on black becomes comfortable, but then lower contrast text becomes much more difficult to read.
Solution? Everyone should be taught to turn down the "vividness" on their monitors instead of trying to compensate (poorly) for this in software.