Redesigning GitHub Repository Page

> Why would someone post this other than to gather feedback?

A good amount of these unsolicited redesigns are to generate interest in what the designer can offer and provide a sample of work.

Other than posting the HN link the OP goes straight to "If you know someone at Github, send them a link to this article.”, so they probably don't necessarily care for feedback (huge assumption based on my experience with past unsolicited redsigns).

> Yes, this redesign idea upsets me. However, that doesn't make the points I raise (from the point of view of a daily GitHub user! and one that uses it professionally!) any less valid.

Your points are definitely valid. But ironically, like the OP, you end your post on a sour note.

By ending with “Stop fucking around with things for no good reason.”, for what is just a harmless redesign by someone that has little-to-no power to affect GitHub's UX, you painted the rest of your comment as unnecessarily critical. I think this is what the parent comment was addressing.

Not everybody speaks English and localisation is expensive. Icons don't require localising.

The article says wraps up by stating the design hasn't lost any information but where's the fork count, watch count and other download options? Also, the lack of borders and flattening of button styles does not improve the design. Borders are even more necessary when data density is increased. Buttons, menus and links now have a variety of borders where they were consistent before.

The menu is marginally better but the extra density there makes the options run together, especially as counts increase, and lacks room for feature expansion. The grey background is useful also as it gives the page sections depth and context without having to label it. A all white background with various text sizes and lengths is not optimal for supporting more than the example design and projects using more text or with longer titles will suffer.

This design doesn't take into consideration how the homepage of a repo relates to the subpages of a repo. The article mentions showing more files yet the in the current design, file view one click away from the current homepage removes most of the account meta data and shows more files already.

This design also doesn't consider the logged out view which has a large call to action banner to get an account strategically embedded at the top of the code tab. This focal point is somewhat lost in the presented redesign and would likely require rounds of A/B testing to decide on a new content breakpoint for this business need.

5/10 - needs work

I hope GitHub stakeholders will never read that article. It's full of nonsense. The author doesn't know what he's talking about in this particular case.

Commits, branches, releases, contributors belong exclusively to Code! There are no releases in Wiki. The GitHub design is perfect and it should stay like that forever :-)

I hate those designers who try to "fresh up" things every single month. Is it because they cannot create something valuable? I was just getting used to the latest icons in my IDE and next month they "fresh it up" and I have no idea what is what.

GitHub has been around for years, it gets the job done, everyone is used to it and knows how it works. Let it stay like that!

The only thing that I'm missing sometimes is file tree. But one can get it with the help of Octotree extension.

There's two main things I don't understand about the redesign and other comments here: what's wrong with nested tabs, and why is it confusing that "releases" is under "code"?

The latter makes sense because a release is basically just a snapshot of the code at a point that the developer(s) thinks it's in an acceptable state for users. Sure, it might reference Wiki pages or issues or contain binaries that aren't in the repo itself, but ultimately it's still directly related to code and at best only partially related to anything else.

As for nested tabs... how is that bad at all? Grouping related things together just makes sense. Maybe Github's current design isn't the best way to group them, but the concept of grouping itself is fine. Grouping related links together, assuming the links are grouped in an intuitive way, is far better than overloading users with a long line of different options. Maybe the current main tabs could be drop-down menus or something?

Also, as mentioned by some other people, I absolutely hate the current trend of making websites and apps be as plain white as possible. Separators, gradients, and soft colour backgrounds make it really easy to distinguish different content areas at a glance. The end result of this redesign is just a mash of text that looks like the CSS didn't load properly.

I'm also very surprised neither this redesign nor Github themselves have added a dark mode. Why do people enjoy staring at white screens for any length of time? I don't trust people who code with light themed environments.