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Because it feels cramped. Just imagine your ebook reader would only show you two lines of text at a time. Yes, you could concentrate on each line without being

Because it feels cramped. Just imagine your ebook reader would only show you two lines of text at a time. Yes, you could concentrate on each line without being distracted but the overall flow is broken. Or to use a different terminology: when you read a website or a book you use two modes of "scrolling" at the same time. The rough scrolling is done by hand when you change a page of the book or when you scroll down the website with your mouse wheel. The finer scrolling is done by moving your eyes which scan the available content for interesting stuff. In my opinion scrolling by eye is much more effortless and faster than scrolling by hand so I'd like to try to reduce scrolling by hand as much as possible. For example on the yc gift page it takes about 44 mouse scroll actions to see 40 items. In contrast I can see all 30 items on the front page with just 1 or 2 mouse scroll actions. A practical example is this German news page: http://m.focus.de http://m.focus.de If you visit it on mobile you will see that they managed to show less than 2 full news items per page (At least on my 720p screen). Half a year I visited that page from time to time but now it is completely unusable because you have to scroll way too often. Afterwards go to http://www.reddit.com/.compact http://www.reddit.com/.compact and see how much more comfortable browsing is when you can see 7-10 items at the same time.

pcmaffey 11y ago
It's a different mode of attention. You're optimizing for consuming lots of information in a short amount of time. But design that optimizes for depth of engagement almost always performs better on metrics that ultimately matter. I'm not saying YCGifts is an outstanding example of this, but to pan the design of the site (and all large font, lots of whitespace designs in general) because it's not optimized for your scan-and-pan method of consumption is shortsighted.

pcmaffey 11y ago

It's a different mode of attention. You're optimizing for consuming lots of information in a short amount of time. But design that optimizes for depth of engagement almost always performs better on metrics that ultimately matter. I'm not saying YCGifts is an outstanding example of this, but to pan the design of the site (and all large font, lots of whitespace designs in general) because it's not optimized for your scan-and-pan method of consumption is shortsighted.