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Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design. Does anyone else actually like the visual design of

by goldmab 15y ago

Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design. Does anyone else actually like the visual design of HN? Besides the endless horizontal text problem, it's very easy to read, and there are no distractingly bad UI elements. Good minimalism, to me.

ugh 15y ago
HN could look much better without adding anything. You could spend endless hours tweaking alignment, margins, rhythm and typography. HN's design currently delivers a solid performance and its content is great. Looking a bit strange to passersby is probably a good thing, I don't think HN's focus is attracting new people, especially new people who are only attracted by the visual design. I have no idea why the visual design of Stack Overflow is called horrible. It's ok, not awesome but certainly ok.
- sgdesign 15y ago
  Maybe "horrible" is a little strong to talk about HN and SO. "Unappealing" would've been a better word. Stack Overflow especially barely has any styling. By the way, in that section I was talking purely about visual design, i.e. styling, or "eye candy". I'm not debating the fact that both sites have great user experience (in fact that's specifically why I picked them as examples).
  - jacobolus 15y ago
    Hacker News’s visual design is just “boring” (though the lines of text that stretch all the way to the edge of wide windows with no space in between them are a pretty bad feature that could be trivially fixed), but I think “horrible” is an entirely fair description of Stack Overflow’s design. It’s claustrophobic and cluttered to the point of being nearly unreadable. Fortunately, the main use of Stack Overflow is arriving from Google, and the question and answer pages – after you scroll past the half-screen of cluttered headers – aren’t too unreasonable.
  - goldmab 15y ago
    What you call eye candy, I call trendiness. To take the closest example: Attack Of Design looks lovely, but that background noisy pixel look is very 2010/2011.
    - ugh 15y ago
      Visual design is a bit like fashion. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that (just as there is nothing wrong with fashion).
    - sgdesign 15y ago
      Heh, I still got a couple months before it's out of date then! I think you're right, trendiness does play a big role in style. And it's also true that complex designs generally get outdated faster than minimalist designs (see: 100% of Flash sites made between 2000 and 2005). On the other hand, it's harder to brand minimalism. So like every design choice, it's a trade-off.
      - goldmab 15y ago
        Well put. And I forgot to mention: thanks for the article! I especially like your definition of "feel", distinct from "look".
wpietri 15y ago
Yeah, that kind of argument makes me crazy. I regularly hear designers bitch about Linux, citing the command line as an example of terrible UI. That's fucking wrong. The Unix command line ecosystem has a fantastically good UI for its audience. (Grep is my homeboy.) It's just that the audience isn't your average design school student. There's no such thing as "good design". There's only good design for your audience. What designers often call "good design" is really "good design for lightweight consumer products".
georgemcbay 15y ago
The three big 'design' problems I have with Hacker News (including visual design and UX) are the already mentioned horizontal text problems (some threads force a horizontal scroll even on my 1920-wide monitor, which is ridiculous), the size of up/down vote arrows (particularly on mobile/small screen devices) and the "expired or unknown link" issue. Other than those three things I think the design is fine for the site's intended purpose.
retube 15y ago
> Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design. Yeah, to my mind this is bullshit. Reddit is another oft-quoted "horrible" design. Yahoo, msn also. It almost seems as if all the most popular sites on the planet are "horribly designed". Almost by definition this can't be true. Personally I find both HN and SO great in terms of design. They're extremely easy to navigate, functionality and calls-to-action are clear and obvious. Data is presented in a meaningful and easy-to-read uncluttered manor. I'm not a design student (by any stretch of the imagination) but for the life of me I wouldn't be able to begin to guess what's so bad about either of these sites, unless it's the lack of super-whizzy glossy css3/js/ajax/flash magic that's the problem. Which is absurd, and only really relevant for "creatives". Disclosure: I didn't read the article, so if it states why they're so bad I've missed out!

by goldmab 15y ago

ugh 15y ago

HN could look much better without adding anything. You could spend endless hours tweaking alignment, margins, rhythm and typography. HN's design currently delivers a solid performance and its content is great. Looking a bit strange to passersby is probably a good thing, I don't think HN's focus is attracting new people, especially new people who are only attracted by the visual design. I have no idea why the visual design of Stack Overflow is called horrible. It's ok, not awesome but certainly ok.

sgdesign 15y ago
Maybe "horrible" is a little strong to talk about HN and SO. "Unappealing" would've been a better word. Stack Overflow especially barely has any styling. By the way, in that section I was talking purely about visual design, i.e. styling, or "eye candy". I'm not debating the fact that both sites have great user experience (in fact that's specifically why I picked them as examples).
- jacobolus 15y ago
  Hacker News’s visual design is just “boring” (though the lines of text that stretch all the way to the edge of wide windows with no space in between them are a pretty bad feature that could be trivially fixed), but I think “horrible” is an entirely fair description of Stack Overflow’s design. It’s claustrophobic and cluttered to the point of being nearly unreadable. Fortunately, the main use of Stack Overflow is arriving from Google, and the question and answer pages – after you scroll past the half-screen of cluttered headers – aren’t too unreasonable.
- goldmab 15y ago
  What you call eye candy, I call trendiness. To take the closest example: Attack Of Design looks lovely, but that background noisy pixel look is very 2010/2011.
  - ugh 15y ago
    Visual design is a bit like fashion. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that (just as there is nothing wrong with fashion).
  - sgdesign 15y ago
    Heh, I still got a couple months before it's out of date then! I think you're right, trendiness does play a big role in style. And it's also true that complex designs generally get outdated faster than minimalist designs (see: 100% of Flash sites made between 2000 and 2005). On the other hand, it's harder to brand minimalism. So like every design choice, it's a trade-off.
    - goldmab 15y ago
      Well put. And I forgot to mention: thanks for the article! I especially like your definition of "feel", distinct from "look".

wpietri 15y ago

Yeah, that kind of argument makes me crazy. I regularly hear designers bitch about Linux, citing the command line as an example of terrible UI. That's fucking wrong. The Unix command line ecosystem has a fantastically good UI for its audience. (Grep is my homeboy.) It's just that the audience isn't your average design school student. There's no such thing as "good design". There's only good design for your audience. What designers often call "good design" is really "good design for lightweight consumer products".

georgemcbay 15y ago

The three big 'design' problems I have with Hacker News (including visual design and UX) are the already mentioned horizontal text problems (some threads force a horizontal scroll even on my 1920-wide monitor, which is ridiculous), the size of up/down vote arrows (particularly on mobile/small screen devices) and the "expired or unknown link" issue. Other than those three things I think the design is fine for the site's intended purpose.

retube 15y ago

> Hacker News or Stack Overflow are good examples of very successful sites that have horrible visual design. Yeah, to my mind this is bullshit. Reddit is another oft-quoted "horrible" design. Yahoo, msn also. It almost seems as if all the most popular sites on the planet are "horribly designed". Almost by definition this can't be true. Personally I find both HN and SO great in terms of design. They're extremely easy to navigate, functionality and calls-to-action are clear and obvious. Data is presented in a meaningful and easy-to-read uncluttered manor. I'm not a design student (by any stretch of the imagination) but for the life of me I wouldn't be able to begin to guess what's so bad about either of these sites, unless it's the lack of super-whizzy glossy css3/js/ajax/flash magic that's the problem. Which is absurd, and only really relevant for "creatives". Disclosure: I didn't read the article, so if it states why they're so bad I've missed out!