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The only site my tech-challenged dad can kind-of use well is Craigslist. Plain text, accessible, good hierarchies, nothing buried or nested, fast, and, cruciall

The only site my tech-challenged dad can kind-of use well is Craigslist. Plain text, accessible, good hierarchies, nothing buried or nested, fast, and, crucially, everything is in the same place every time he visits. Some of the best UX on the Web.

jakear 6y ago
Not to mention you can use it without any sort of account. Truly fantastic website design.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
It feels like modern website design conflates “better UX” with “surface level attractiveness” Craigslist is a great example, original reddit is another example: my UI/UX designer friend considers original reddit to be quote “ugly and horrible”, and while there definitely could be some improvements, the reddit redesign (which I know my friend would come up with something similar to) is quite literally orders of magnitude worse, but is aesthetically “nicer”. Original reddit looks ugly, but everything you want from an interface is there once you get through a 3 minute learning curve: information dense, enough white space (but not too much), consistent behaviour, fast, respects scrolling, etc etc. Where did we go “wrong” with web design that what we have now is seemingly worse? And what does a good balance of “actually functionally useful” and “aesthetically pleasing” look like?
- jakear 6y ago
  I personally love the new reddit design: it’s so miserable to use that it has broken my reddit addiction almost entirely! Now I just need HN to do something similar and maybe I’ll get back to being a productive member of society ;)
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    The site looks and performs fine to me with the redesign. The problems I have with it are the obnoxious "open in app!" Pop-up and the subreddit preview that interrupts the comment section... Totally unacceptable.
    - jakear 6y ago
      Those two are the precise reasons I left actually.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - arp242 6y ago
      It literally does not work on my laptop: it stutters all the time when scrolling, navigating, etc. It's unusable even with the greatest degree of patience. This happens in both Chrome and Firefox, both with the default settings (uBlock improves things slightly, but not by much). I genuinely thought there must be something wrong with my setup, but several of my friends have reported similar experiences across different platforms. Granted, I have a cheap not very fast laptop, but it's less than a year old and almost everything else works just fine – certainly not as horrendously slow as Reddit. These problems seem to disappear if you gave a faster machine from what I've been told. But, yeah; it's broken for millions of people who have low-end to medium hardware. I genuinely don't understand how they could ship something so dysfunctional for so many people.
    - loco5niner 6y ago
      > The site looks and performs fine to me with the redesign Infinite scroll kills it after a while for me. You must spend less than 4 hours per session.
  - tumetab1 6y ago
    I dislike the Reddit design only because I disagree with its goals: * Make users use the app * Make Reddit more like Instagram (browser visual content)

jakear 6y ago

Not to mention you can use it without any sort of account. Truly fantastic website design.

FridgeSeal 6y ago

It feels like modern website design conflates “better UX” with “surface level attractiveness” Craigslist is a great example, original reddit is another example: my UI/UX designer friend considers original reddit to be quote “ugly and horrible”, and while there definitely could be some improvements, the reddit redesign (which I know my friend would come up with something similar to) is quite literally orders of magnitude worse, but is aesthetically “nicer”. Original reddit looks ugly, but everything you want from an interface is there once you get through a 3 minute learning curve: information dense, enough white space (but not too much), consistent behaviour, fast, respects scrolling, etc etc. Where did we go “wrong” with web design that what we have now is seemingly worse? And what does a good balance of “actually functionally useful” and “aesthetically pleasing” look like?

jakear 6y ago
I personally love the new reddit design: it’s so miserable to use that it has broken my reddit addiction almost entirely! Now I just need HN to do something similar and maybe I’ll get back to being a productive member of society ;)
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  The site looks and performs fine to me with the redesign. The problems I have with it are the obnoxious "open in app!" Pop-up and the subreddit preview that interrupts the comment section... Totally unacceptable.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Those two are the precise reasons I left actually.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - arp242 6y ago
    It literally does not work on my laptop: it stutters all the time when scrolling, navigating, etc. It's unusable even with the greatest degree of patience. This happens in both Chrome and Firefox, both with the default settings (uBlock improves things slightly, but not by much). I genuinely thought there must be something wrong with my setup, but several of my friends have reported similar experiences across different platforms. Granted, I have a cheap not very fast laptop, but it's less than a year old and almost everything else works just fine – certainly not as horrendously slow as Reddit. These problems seem to disappear if you gave a faster machine from what I've been told. But, yeah; it's broken for millions of people who have low-end to medium hardware. I genuinely don't understand how they could ship something so dysfunctional for so many people.
  - loco5niner 6y ago
    > The site looks and performs fine to me with the redesign Infinite scroll kills it after a while for me. You must spend less than 4 hours per session.
- tumetab1 6y ago
  I dislike the Reddit design only because I disagree with its goals: * Make users use the app * Make Reddit more like Instagram (browser visual content)