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But why is the Browse Activity tab now full of huge bolded text and gobs of whitespace? I wasn't unhappy with how it was, but this seems to strictly be worse, e

But why is the Browse Activity tab now full of huge bolded text and gobs of whitespace? I wasn't unhappy with how it was, but this seems to strictly be worse, especially if you follow a decent number of people

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
manigandham 9y ago
There's a ridiculous UI trend of adding whitespace and hiding everything behind more menus and popups now... even though we all have bigger/high-res screens with more real estate than ever.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  I'm going to upvote this to un-grey you a little bit, because I'm interested in hearing your ideas for how this could improve. It sounds like you've put some thought into this, so given the current layout, what would your version look like with respect to current design trends?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    That's precisely the problem, design trends don't really matter, especially for a productive app like Github (vs something like a marketing site). Look at how information dense Excel can be with a typical spreadsheet, and the vast majority of users have no problem with it - yet when it comes to a basic page listing a few items, there's 50px of padding around each item in 12px font. Suggestions: remove the padding, group actions by the same person or same repo to remove repeated clutter, add descriptions of the repos in the front page so it doesnt require a click to see more, etc...
- shortstuffsushi 9y ago
  > even though we all have bigger/high-res screens with more real estate than ever. I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this perhaps the reason why this is happening? If we have so much more space, we've got room for extra big bars. If we get higher resolutions, smaller fonts are (possibly) harder to read, so we make them bigger. Maybe I'm just making stuff up, though.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Maybe, but there's definitely a reduction in actual information density instead of just filling out the screen. Way too many clicks to go through menus now for the sake of keeping things "clean".
  - reilly3000 9y ago
    Responsive design sort of forces these trade offs as mobile screen real estate and the demand for consistentcy across devices means dumbing down to the smallest possible screen.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  It's all influenced by mobile, where screen real estate is limited and the focus for every screen is much, much higher than on desktop. It makes sense for that design philosophy to bleed out onto desktop / websites.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    It doesn't make sense at all. Proper responsive design should handle showing much more data and expanding properly for desktop browsers. Remember the original iPhone was popular for being able to show the entire desktop page on a mobile browser - we don't need everything to be big giant buttons.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

manigandham 9y ago

There's a ridiculous UI trend of adding whitespace and hiding everything behind more menus and popups now... even though we all have bigger/high-res screens with more real estate than ever.

jameskegel 9y ago
I'm going to upvote this to un-grey you a little bit, because I'm interested in hearing your ideas for how this could improve. It sounds like you've put some thought into this, so given the current layout, what would your version look like with respect to current design trends?
- manigandham 9y ago
  That's precisely the problem, design trends don't really matter, especially for a productive app like Github (vs something like a marketing site). Look at how information dense Excel can be with a typical spreadsheet, and the vast majority of users have no problem with it - yet when it comes to a basic page listing a few items, there's 50px of padding around each item in 12px font. Suggestions: remove the padding, group actions by the same person or same repo to remove repeated clutter, add descriptions of the repos in the front page so it doesnt require a click to see more, etc...
shortstuffsushi 9y ago
> even though we all have bigger/high-res screens with more real estate than ever. I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this perhaps the reason why this is happening? If we have so much more space, we've got room for extra big bars. If we get higher resolutions, smaller fonts are (possibly) harder to read, so we make them bigger. Maybe I'm just making stuff up, though.
- manigandham 9y ago
  Maybe, but there's definitely a reduction in actual information density instead of just filling out the screen. Way too many clicks to go through menus now for the sake of keeping things "clean".
- reilly3000 9y ago
  Responsive design sort of forces these trade offs as mobile screen real estate and the demand for consistentcy across devices means dumbing down to the smallest possible screen.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
It's all influenced by mobile, where screen real estate is limited and the focus for every screen is much, much higher than on desktop. It makes sense for that design philosophy to bleed out onto desktop / websites.
- manigandham 9y ago
  It doesn't make sense at all. Proper responsive design should handle showing much more data and expanding properly for desktop browsers. Remember the original iPhone was popular for being able to show the entire desktop page on a mobile browser - we don't need everything to be big giant buttons.