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The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.
by dahfizz 6y ago
The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design.
HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.
- asiando 6y agoIt’s not that hard to display a few paragraphs. It’s hard to display complex pieces of information while also making them look good to the client (which, we should remember, pays our bills)
- Spooks 6y agoHN is a pretty minimal site though - it is just a message board.
- majewsky 6y agoA message board like HN is more difficult than you think to get right across a wide range of screen sizes, just because comments can nest many levels deep. HN arguably has problems of its own in that regard.
- alpaca128 6y agoAlmost all websites are pretty minimal in terms of their features, but they're built as if they were an in-browser image editor. Reddit is barely more than HN with pictures and a LOT of bloat inbetween. It could be as minimal as 4chan-style imageboards if you add voting and a slightly different comment view. Youtube is just a tiled list of thumbnails or an embedded video player followed by a list of thumbnails. It could work 100% without JS outside of the video controls. Instead it's a huge, slow mess. It's also inconsistent; in my case it scales the list of videos from subscriptions to about 50% of the browser window's width, leaving a chunk of empty space on the sides. The startpage with basically the same layout always uses the full width.
- dahfizz 6y ago100% agree. The kneejerk reaction of "well HN is so simple, of course it has a simple design" has the causation backwards. You only realize how simple HN is because they stick to a simple design! 99% of websites are (could be) just static text and images. Facebook, Reddit, CNN etc could look like HN. Amazon could look like craigs list. The amount of sites that actually need and are enhanced by JS bloat is very low.
- petters 6y agoIt works beautifully for it's indented audience. I think many people, my parents included, would have trouble navigating HN on a phone. Especially upvote/downvote.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoI generally agree. But thumbs up/down is difficult on mobile with my fat fingers, even worse since I've had nervr damage.
- falcolas 6y agoPinch zooming works on HN, which helps me hit the buttons. I might prefer slide-to-action like narwhal's Reddit interface, but I'm OK with HN not being quite that fancy.
- matsemann 6y agoLolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss the mark when jumping to the next line when it's multiple lines in a paragraph. HN is also the only site I have zoomed in on desktop, as the font is unreadably small on high dpi devices. And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.
- dahfizz 6y agoI can read long lines just fine, and I like that the full width of the viewport is used. Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. If HN instead tried to artificially limit the viewport in code (which is something lots of web developers do), they would break all sorts of other use cases for no reason. That's what I mean when I say websites tend to overcomplicate their design.
- matsemann 6y ago> Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. Except you're ignoring mobile devices.
- Tagbert 6y agoNo, the say that HN does it works regardless of screen width. If the site were to assign a fixed width, it would conflict with mobile devices.
- jefftk 6y agoThis is why CSS has "max-width".
- badsectoracula 6y agoI read HN on mobile all the time, what is the problem with it? The only issue i've noticed is being a bit harder to tap the show/hide branch icon but it is a minor issue.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nobleach 6y agoSure. Now let's say you're shopping for a brand new rug for your living room. Are you going to buy it from a site the looks like HackerNews? If so, I'd venture to say you're in the minority. A used rug from Craigslist, perhaps, but a brand new rug costing hundreds, you're going to want a site that looks VERY professional.
- Robotbeat 6y agoSo you’re saying “professional == follows modern design fads” as a proxy for how legitimate a site is. And maybe you’re right that is a somewhat useful (if unreliable) proxy for legitimateness, but it’s not an argument that it’s good design.
- ncallaway 6y agoFor a site that sells rugs, good design is design that accommodates all users and sells as many rugs as possible. So an accessible site that follows modern design fads is probably the best thing to have (if that sells rugs).
- tshaddox 6y agoIf one of the goals of design is to serve as a signal for how trustworthy your business is, then it is absolutely an argument that it’s good design.
- dranka 6y agoI would definetly pick the store with the hacker newsish website!
- jrockway 6y agoAmazon is a design garbage bin, but it doesn't seem to be reducing their sales.
- anon321321323 6y agoActually I've bought rugs and computers from websites not much more complex than HN. Both sets of transactions went smoothly and quickly with no issues. I wish I could say the same for some very flashy websites I've used. On some I can't even get a delivery estimate until I've submitted credit card etc.
- oblio 6y agoAnd yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar. There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS. There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in real life. I've gotten used to it but it still sucks. The contrast is super low. HN is an MVP for a super minimalist forum that wouldn't fly for any other kind of community except for the intersection between hackers and wannabe entrepreneurs.
- planb 6y agoWhat? I can’t count how often I accidentally downvoted a post because I can’t hit the correct arrow on mobile!
- SilasX 6y agoBut it doesn't break your ability to zoom, so you at least have the option to (quickly) fix it.
- efreak 6y agoI can't downvote (I think?) and I don't miss it. I use an android client (Materialistic) that doesn't even provide me with an option to do so, and I haven't looked for a way to do so. If I disagree with a post or comment and don't want to add a response, I just move on. If I'm in the browser, I'm probably not even signed in unless I want to upvote or save something.
- DangerousPie 6y agoHN is almost useless on mobile. Tiny UI elements that are hard to hit, people using code blocks for quotes that cut off after the first few characters, etc
- falcolas 6y agoAt least it allows for pinch zooming, which is (IMO, of course) an acceptable compromise. Maintain readability for the text while still making it possible to hit the UI elements.
- cptskippy 6y agoAny site allows pinch zooming if you use Firefox and toggle a setting. That isn't an acceptable compromise, you end up doing a lot of horizontal scaling to read block quotes and zooming to touch UI elements. It's not the worst, but it is trivial to do better.
- altfredd 6y ago> you end up doing a lot of horizontal scaling to read block quotes what block quotes?
- SilasX 6y agoExactly. Most of the time, recoverable flaws are better than immutable bad design.
- StillBored 6y agoIt does clamp text at some max width. If you have a couple 1440p monitors try stretching the browser window across screens. Its actually one of those cases where the old news print model of multiple columns would work well, but that is much harder than it should be with CSS, so pretty much no one does newsprint style scrolling where you read all the columns and then scroll to the next set.