I think that it looks good, but I think that you could change how you display the number of points each post has accumulated. The design of the site does not seem to fit the culture of hacker news. Look at the current website, it looks like it was hacked together by a programmer not a designer.
I think that a redesign of hacker news would include a bit of the old site's spirit.
just my opinion please excuse my grammar
Sorry, but I don't like it. I do like the top header and the color scheme in general. The texture in the header looks snazzy, in a good way.
The space wasted by the listing of stories is very excessive. That's the meat and potatoes of the site, yet I see 10 stories in the first screenfold vs 24 now. Why dedicate so much space to the wide "XX points" label? Is it even clickable (why would it be?) Arguably upvoting a story is more important and is actually actionable, yet the up vote "caret" looks way less clickable. The comment count balloons are jarring in their size and contrast and their random placement on the right side is distracting. When I glance at the page, I notice this jagged curve of gray dots, yet it delivers no useful information (other than how long the headline is, which is not useful).
So I think it's all about the spacing. When I look at that page, is the headline list easily perusable end parsable? I don't think it is. It is more spaced out than the current design, but it is surrounded and squeezed by these loud new elements. Think about the negative space created by the three new columns before the headline--I think clutters up the headline list.
Compared to the current design, this is a worse design. While the current HN design could use improvement (IMO text is too tiny), it does have a striking simplicity and focus on headlines that I love.
I apologize if I come off sounding harsh, and I certainly don't have design chops myself to pull off something like that (though I'd like to at some point in the future...)
I understand you won't get nearly as much "karma" for linking to website in a comment as you would if you hit the frontpage, but now I had to go looking for your article in the long list of articles on the newest page with no real gain.
It looks good, although I also like the current, simpler design. One thing I really like about your mock-up is that the link to the comments page has a much bigger click target. I lost count of the times I wanted to open the comments page but missed the target by a couple of pixels because it's so darn small (only 7pt).
If I were you, I'd drop the leftmost number (1, 2, 3 ... 20) which looks totally useless to me. I'd also move the points number right below the upvote button so that everyone can immediately tell what it is. No need to repeat "Points" 20 times in every page.
Also, screenshots like this should be in PNG, not JPG.
All fairness, this is perhaps my favorite HN redesign that I've seen. I'm a fan of the white space, and the far more readable text.
I don't know why we're numbering the posts on HN, so I won't critique it on the redesign, but I think you could safely drop that as an artifact and then, perhaps, the 'points' section wouldn't look so large.
The only thing I flat out dislike is the number of comments floating out to the right. It's a ragged-right design, and it bugs the crap out of me (though it might just be me).
On the whole, I'd much rather be using that site than this one though, and that's gotta be the benchmark for success. I don't think it's perfect, but I definitely agree that it's a big improvement.
I like it, but it feels like the gmail redesign with too much space. Some people like that, I'd prefer to see a maximum number of articles on one page.
+1 I really hope this trend of adding uber whitespace is short lived. On a site like this, I feel like the designer's goal should be to get as many links on the screen as she can without me feeling the site is overly cluttered. Solving that problem by blasting me with whitespace frustrates me.
I'd settle for a hacker news hardware upgrade instead, I keep wondering if someone plugged me into an analogue modem with these 30 second page load times. I guess that's the price of popularity.
I feel HN does need a face lift. What with it showcasing the designs of tomorrow everyday and all!
I agree with kijin, the numbers besides the posts seem of no use. We need to use the space so as to get as many posts as possible in the view without scrolling, so I wouldn't mind narrowing the distance between the posts either. Maybe a hover can magnify the post a little.
Posts that link to URL could have some distinct style or something.
I don't get what is wrong with current HN really. The site is not meant to attract customers or be beautiful - it is a news submission aggregator. The focus needs to be on maximizing information density while maintaining clarity. Titles, upvote icons, and comment numbers are sufficient to get that across, so adding "flair" will only detract from that appearance.
Also, I hate sites with huge title bars like that example. It pushes the actual content further down the page. Sure, this isn't 2002 where having 90% of your content in the initial view of page the isn't as important anymore, especially on a site like HN, but still maximizing for information density makes a users life easier.
Redesigning a popular site is a good way for up-and-coming designers to show off their skills - but it's important to consider the target audience and their priorities. Yes, HN users want speed, but mentioning page load times and moving on shows that you haven't really thought about that. We want to get into the meat of HN (which is the conversations) as fast as possible. Everything that gets in the way of that is bad.
1) Spacing - designers love adding extra space, and on first glance it looks beautiful. But too much space slows down browsing speed.
2) The numbered articles - more eye catching than the actual content. A user reading that page will have to spend concentration on not looking at the numbers.
3) The same with the bubbles around the comment counts and upvotes. Those values are important for HN readers - but not as important as the actual topic.
I'm sorry, but this is a perfect example of the difference between design and eye candy. Often, people wonder why I spend $50,000 a year going to design school, when I can learn how to make things that are just as shiny by reading psdtuts.com.
The difference is that style is only skin-deep. It's superficial. It's an added bonus on top of design. Design, on the other hand, is the core of the product: how it functions. It's the soul: what story it tells.
Your redesign, while prettier, does nothing to improve the user experience, or to tell a story. Sure, it's easier on the eyes, but it's a much worse design, in that it makes the user experience worse. It's now harder to read: less information is on the screen. (11 story as opposed to 25, on my screen.) The information hierarchy within stories is less clear. The eye has to jump around more to get the secondary information (poster / point count / comment count / time posted). The flag functionality is simply gone…
You did a good job making it look better, and should be commended for that. But as for the design, try again.
PS: Take this as friendly critique. Take it in, learn what you can, try again. Rise, repeat. Don't be discouraged, but realize you have a long way to go. You'll get there!
Whilst I don't want to pick on the OP, this is such an important point. Its all too often that 'design' gets confused for 'eye candy'. This doesn't just happen on websites, but in all design based professions. And this is a bit of a case in point.
The HN audience tends to want high-information-density, not necessarily visual joy (or for that matter extra sugar for clarity of new users). Its a very different thing to design than a website-shopfront. Generally I think it works very well as is....
"As is" is still lacking. Reading these comments across almost the entire width of my monitor is not good design. You do get information density, but my belief is that in the case of reading paragraphs, information density is secondary to readability.
All of these things may be true, but the biggest usability issue facing HN right now is load times. HN has undergone exponential growth even in the short time I've been here, and the site hasn't kept up with it. Given that we're all programmers, perhaps we should take it upon ourselves to dig through the source and see what we can speed up.
i've been trying out some of the hacker news style extensions, and this one suffers from the same problem as the others -- when you're reading comments, and the comments are centered without a background color for the content div, you can't figure out how deeply nested comments are. it makes it difficult to figure out which comments are top level and which are responses.
That's a good point that's worth addressing. What do you suggest? Left-aligning the content to the window border or something else? Pull requests to the repo on github welcome!
I think you're a little too harsh. The comment bubbles are helpful.
Your eye might need to jump around more because you're not used to the new design yet. Sometimes an article might say "discuss" which just means 0 comments. This would make that much clearer.
You might say you shouldn't have to "get used to" a good redesign, but after using a website for years, almost everyone would need to overcome old habits.
HN might be designed to compact a large amount of data in a small area, but reading tiny letters isn't exactly good UX.
Am I missing something? I don't see any noticeable difference between this and the current design.
It's now harder to read
I find it immensely more readable than the current design, which to me is a left-justified wall of dense, unnavigable text. The low-contrast colors of the secondary information make it hard to pick out information quickly and increase eye strain.
Schooled designers are very sensitive to fonts. While he sees a world of difference because of that font change, you might see almost the same design. Because they study them deeply. They see them from another perspective, more like the story behind them. I've worked with many designers from Art Center in Pasadena and this has happened to me many times, where I need to make a further effort to understand them, and viceversa.
I kept reading down the page hoping to see the reasoning behind the choices made, but was disappointed to find none.
This is why I disagree with the notion that style is only skin-deep. It's an integral part of UX, but only when considered within the framework of UX. The points value is now shaded in 3D: Why? The rank is now an orange circle: How does this help the user?
The best visual design is always based on UX. Do users consult the rank often? If not, the orange should be reserved for something else more demanding of the user's attention. Are the point totals interactive? If not, the 3D shading should be saved for use as an affordance somewhere where there is interaction. It's questions like these that turn a pretty visual design into something that not only looks but works great.
> This is why I disagree with the notion that style is only skin-deep.
Semantics, but I think you are agreeing with your parent that there should be something deeper than the gloss applied in this redesign. That design must go more than skin-deep. Arguably the word “style” could refer to paint jobs, so your statement was fairly confusing.
I fully agree with your comments regarding the bizarre amount of visual attention demanded by the rank numbers here and the points’ affordance of clickability (and said as much on a comment there).
Hi SeoxyS, if you have time do you mind critiquing my side project's design on this page? It's a website for students to find buyers and sellers of used textbooks (usually other students).
For people those who do not have bandwidth problems. Resolving the story in Readability like distraction and ad-free style which include comments in bottom would be great. Also Commenting is hard to follow on HN.
"Design, on the other hand, is the core of the product: how it functions. It's the soul: what story it tells."
I find it ironic that this submission is near the top of the front page at the same time as this (excellent) essay about startup culture (among other things) is also on the front page:
The design of any website is supposed to be a reflection of your company culture. It needs to make the people you're trying to attract feel comfortable and at home. Sorry to be blunt, but this redesign does the exact opposite of that, for me at least.
Please don't take offense at this because it isn't meant toward you as a person; I fully support people doing redesigns of sites and posting them, but in this case I can't help but feeling like "dear god no." If you watch Rocky IV, the reason it's so easy to root for Rocky is that he's a product of his community, whereas the other guy is a product of some cold and unfeeling scientific process. Hacker News is a community, so you want a website that feels like something that a community would make. This redesign just doesn't do that.
So far the best. The 3 most important things are the largest: comments, link to story, upvote (though I would've moved upvote to the right of story link--but that's just me, I don't believe in upvoting anymore).
I hate the assumption that higher information density is always a good thing. White space is important, for aesthetics, readability, and usability. HN in its current state is far too tightly spaced.
I wouldn't call it eye candy, exactly, but I do think that most HN design submissions are little more than illustration. But I also think that design is much more closely related to engineering than any primarily superficial discipline. (Such is my experience after an undergraduate in physics and a master's in architecture.)
Both engineering and design are instances of the same type of problem solving process. But because design is focused more on qualitative and subjective elements, its state space is much larger and, I believe, its design solutions (or attractors) more fuzzy. Because of this, design and engineering actualize themselves quite differently in real life, often requiring different skill-sets.
And I think that because the web and application design disciplines require more engineering-thinking -- architecture, for example, must also consider spatio-temporal qualities -- most design-thinking is delegated only to the most superficial facets of the process. What would really help understanding is for more designers to push into the engineering side of things, and more engineers into the design side of things.
Another thing I think the current HN design does well is act as a filter or repellent. Hackers can typically deal with an unattractive interface, whilst the average person would be turned off and leave the site. Those who stay on the site do so for its content, they don't need any extra convincing to stay.
Also the current design makes the headlines the most contrast (black), which really is the main information on the page. In his "design" he has all kind of visual and distracting garbage, like the orange numbers (why, why???).
And yeah, insane spacing between the lines makes absolutely no sense.
The striped header is not more visually appealing than the current plain one.
Here are some thoughts on why I made mine this way:
1) Hacker news is read by hundred of thousands of people every month- to adapt to a completely new design would wreck the user experience the users have come to expect.
2) Your patterns and icons, while I appreciate the gesture takes focus away from the headlines. The most important thing should be the headlines on hacker news. That's how it was designed to be. Everything else should pale in color compared to it.
3) As SeoxyS mentioned, I designed mine as to not disrupt the functionality that everyone's used to. What I did was "design" the page to improve readability. I made the background color behind the text a light grey so it's not as gloomy as the current site and used a dark grey font rather than the black on current site to improve faster reading. Black on white is always tiring on the eyes, which is why I tried to adapt different shades of grey.
4) I don't like HN's top nav bar right now because it takes focus away from the logo. The logo should be consistent with the one found and recognized on YC's main site. A logo on the site should be loud and clear. I made the top nav bar a darker grey so that it would give focus back to the logo.
5) The selected links are now orange instead of white. By having tiny accents of color, it adds the kind of eye candy that you want but nonetheless tied in with functionality. UX comes first, then UI. You can make something pretty after think about how you'll first make it user-friendly.
6) To improve eye candy, I gave the bottom nav the bright color of HN to really lighten up the page. I felt that otherwise there would be too many grey areas.
7) I moved the search to the top and yes, this does change what the users are used to, but in my opinion a good change. I've read many posts where people (including myself) have had a hard time finding the search button. To move it to the top nav will adapt to web standards.
Normally, I'd make the search larger and start right aligned at the end of the top nav bar and instead move the username + logout link above it, but I felt that it might be too disruptive, so I sacrificed what looks the best for a better experience (this is important).
The main text is too light and low-contrast: it looks like it is frightened of being there and trying to run away and hide! (and so the most big and powerful thing on the page is the footer, which does not seem the right priority...)
RE: 6) The orange, in-your-face footer is very distracting. My eyes are attracted to it constantly, and away from the articles (which as noted by the other commenter are too low contrast). My $0.02
I think you're missing the point here SeoxyS. I just put an initial concept out there for everyone to see and maybe get a flavour of how a redesign/reskinning of HN may look. I understand there's a lot to be desired and I haven't sat down yet and put the time into fleshing everything out properly, hence this will probably be iterated on a thousand times.
I appreciate the feedback, and will definitely take it into consideration.
> I'm sorry, but this is a perfect example of the difference between design and eye candy.
You are absolutely right. Eye candy can quickly become eye straining.
Hacker News is successfull not only because of its content but also because of its design. It's simple and pragmatic, as it should be. I always need only seconds to read the headlines of the whole page.
I think of a "story" as a narrative: a sequence of events involving characters. In an epic story, there's a hero, a quest, thresholds, guardians, a special world, obstacles, tests, allies, a shadow, a return etc. Could you elaborate on what "story" means in terms of design?
Although I agree with what you're saying sometimes spending more time on eye candy than the actual design can be useful.
Eye candy doesn't help the user with navigation or add functionality but it can make a website look more professional and in-turn more trustworthy.
For e commerce websites getting the users trust is an important consideration and I'd argue eye candy is maybe just as important as the design.
Of course in the case of Hacker News I wouldn't like to see this kind of redesign implemented and would prefer the focus of the site's design to be solely on improving it's functionality and usability.
How can you criticize the design, then, without taking it for a drive to test the functionality? I think this guy got it pretty damn well. I've seen other submissions on this page, including the one you link to, that fail in a major way: the damn up/down buttons. I don't know where the down buttons are going to go, but the current ones (and your linked ones) are too small and close together. On a small screen or with a clumsy (read: touch) interface they are very difficult to use. Designs that preserve them FAIL badly- not because they look bad, but for the very reasons you state: the function suffers for the looks.
And what's the point of the huge margins on the one you linked to? Can't we make better use of the space somehow?
I think the OP has a helluva nice looking start to a website redesign, and I hope he doesn't get discouraged from the hivemind criticism I'm seeing on this page.
Totally agree with your critique, but maybe you can enlighten me.. whats the advantage of even having the post numbers? Seems like unnecessary information.
There are other functional things with HN that need improvement. For instance, when you edit a comment, and hit update, you should be taken back to the post. Although I have to edit my comments to fix typos, maybe editing comments shouldn't be allowed at all?
> I know Hacker News is all about fast load times and minimal bandwidth usage, hence the lack of much graphical work in the current version.
Actually, I believe that the simplified design of HN as it is currently helps ward off the typical Internet surfer looking for new links to click on. The last thing HN needs is to attract users who only post pictures of animals.
My single piece of design criticism for HN would be to provide a hi-res upvote triangle image (heck, why isn't it pure CSS?) for retina display devices.
My single piece of design criticism for HN would be to provide a hi-res upvote triangle image (heck, why isn't it pure CSS?) for retina display devices.
I don't think HN is about fast load times and minimal bandwidth. Yahoo YSlow and Google PageSpeed reports recommend that ycombinator.com use HTTP compression, minify HTML and JS, and use HTTP caching for static resources.
Your design is nice but not very mobile device friendly. and theres no point in putting the post position in orange background, its unreadable/invisible.
- The red list numbers are essentially glorified, distracting, bullets
- Why does "x Points" look like a button? The word "points" also does not need to be repeated for each item, or needs to be deemphasized in favor of the number.
- Comment links are all over the place and look like a river of grey blobs running down the page.
- Article titles need more emphasis than the previously mentioned elements
Yeah.
During several years i visited HN from time to time, frowning at the old-school layout. And promptly left.
Until one day, i matured enough, and realized that simplicity is elegant.
Though, i dislike the low-contrast browngray background. It's annoying for reading.
Make the layout user-customizable to each login. Let users choose. Is that too hard?
Nothing personal, but you are missing the most important point of existing design - it's the information density and the lack of any whitespace whatsoever. Whatever the redesign it needs to preserve 20+ stories per page, it's a must.
It seems to me as though most of the critics here dislike the decreased information density more than anything else. This is a problem easily solved; make the text smaller and decrease the space between elements.
On a broader topic, though, many of the commenters appear to view style and substance as opposing forces. O hackers, can we not have both the functionality and the form? The presence and organization of information does not fundamentally conflict with rounded rectangles, smoother fonts, CSS buttons and all the other jazz that populate our startup pages.
Arguing that the ugliness of the current design improves the quality of the user base is the online equivalent of wearing coke bottle glasses because it makes you look nerdier. Let's present our services as both sexy and smart.
What's most telling about this situation is that something that is clearly not that good nor interesting is at the top of HN. Perhaps this is just 'good' inasmuch as its HN bait.
Not a commentary on this particular design, but rather just a general thought: I would argue that the very utilitarian design of this site is actually a feature rather than a deficiency to be corrected. Generally the point of design is to send an unspoken message. For a store, you want to send the message of "we're safe and professional and welcoming", so rounded corners and soft gradients and open spaces are of much utility there.
On the other hand, for a site designed for self described "hackers", I think having a very utilitarian as-simple-as-possible not-trying-to-impress-you design sends the message that "appearances don't matter here, the content is the focus"
Nice design but it doesn't add anything to the site experience for me. The header seems too big for orange. I used the option to turn the color of the header on HN from orange to white to further simplify the look of it. I do kinda like the number of comments bubble though. I'd love to see a link on the 404 pages.
160 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThe space wasted by the listing of stories is very excessive. That's the meat and potatoes of the site, yet I see 10 stories in the first screenfold vs 24 now. Why dedicate so much space to the wide "XX points" label? Is it even clickable (why would it be?) Arguably upvoting a story is more important and is actually actionable, yet the up vote "caret" looks way less clickable. The comment count balloons are jarring in their size and contrast and their random placement on the right side is distracting. When I glance at the page, I notice this jagged curve of gray dots, yet it delivers no useful information (other than how long the headline is, which is not useful).
So I think it's all about the spacing. When I look at that page, is the headline list easily perusable end parsable? I don't think it is. It is more spaced out than the current design, but it is surrounded and squeezed by these loud new elements. Think about the negative space created by the three new columns before the headline--I think clutters up the headline list.
Compared to the current design, this is a worse design. While the current HN design could use improvement (IMO text is too tiny), it does have a striking simplicity and focus on headlines that I love.
I apologize if I come off sounding harsh, and I certainly don't have design chops myself to pull off something like that (though I'd like to at some point in the future...)
I run HN at 3 CTRL-+s. It solves the problem, permanently in most browsers.
http://news.ycombinator.com/newest (HN Aligned)
In this case: http://natewienert.com/hackernew
I understand you won't get nearly as much "karma" for linking to website in a comment as you would if you hit the frontpage, but now I had to go looking for your article in the long list of articles on the newest page with no real gain.
If I were you, I'd drop the leftmost number (1, 2, 3 ... 20) which looks totally useless to me. I'd also move the points number right below the upvote button so that everyone can immediately tell what it is. No need to repeat "Points" 20 times in every page.
Also, screenshots like this should be in PNG, not JPG.
I don't know why we're numbering the posts on HN, so I won't critique it on the redesign, but I think you could safely drop that as an artifact and then, perhaps, the 'points' section wouldn't look so large.
The only thing I flat out dislike is the number of comments floating out to the right. It's a ragged-right design, and it bugs the crap out of me (though it might just be me).
On the whole, I'd much rather be using that site than this one though, and that's gotta be the benchmark for success. I don't think it's perfect, but I definitely agree that it's a big improvement.
I agree with kijin, the numbers besides the posts seem of no use. We need to use the space so as to get as many posts as possible in the view without scrolling, so I wouldn't mind narrowing the distance between the posts either. Maybe a hover can magnify the post a little. Posts that link to URL could have some distinct style or something.
Also, I hate sites with huge title bars like that example. It pushes the actual content further down the page. Sure, this isn't 2002 where having 90% of your content in the initial view of page the isn't as important anymore, especially on a site like HN, but still maximizing for information density makes a users life easier.
1) Spacing - designers love adding extra space, and on first glance it looks beautiful. But too much space slows down browsing speed.
2) The numbered articles - more eye catching than the actual content. A user reading that page will have to spend concentration on not looking at the numbers.
3) The same with the bubbles around the comment counts and upvotes. Those values are important for HN readers - but not as important as the actual topic.
The design is less important than the content.
The difference is that style is only skin-deep. It's superficial. It's an added bonus on top of design. Design, on the other hand, is the core of the product: how it functions. It's the soul: what story it tells.
Your redesign, while prettier, does nothing to improve the user experience, or to tell a story. Sure, it's easier on the eyes, but it's a much worse design, in that it makes the user experience worse. It's now harder to read: less information is on the screen. (11 story as opposed to 25, on my screen.) The information hierarchy within stories is less clear. The eye has to jump around more to get the secondary information (poster / point count / comment count / time posted). The flag functionality is simply gone…
You did a good job making it look better, and should be commended for that. But as for the design, try again.
PS: Take this as friendly critique. Take it in, learn what you can, try again. Rise, repeat. Don't be discouraged, but realize you have a long way to go. You'll get there!
--
Note: Check out this redesign, which I think is quite effective, and is installable as a extra stylesheet on the current HN code: http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Hacker_News-20120420-180413.png
The HN audience tends to want high-information-density, not necessarily visual joy (or for that matter extra sugar for clarity of new users). Its a very different thing to design than a website-shopfront. Generally I think it works very well as is....
Nitpick: Observing exponential growth doesn't depend on the time span.
Your eye might need to jump around more because you're not used to the new design yet. Sometimes an article might say "discuss" which just means 0 comments. This would make that much clearer.
You might say you shouldn't have to "get used to" a good redesign, but after using a website for years, almost everyone would need to overcome old habits.
HN might be designed to compact a large amount of data in a small area, but reading tiny letters isn't exactly good UX.
Am I missing something? I don't see any noticeable difference between this and the current design.
It's now harder to read
I find it immensely more readable than the current design, which to me is a left-justified wall of dense, unnavigable text. The low-contrast colors of the secondary information make it hard to pick out information quickly and increase eye strain.
The changes are subtle, but they are noticeable. Enough to be visually appealing, yet keep the practical design.
This is why I disagree with the notion that style is only skin-deep. It's an integral part of UX, but only when considered within the framework of UX. The points value is now shaded in 3D: Why? The rank is now an orange circle: How does this help the user?
The best visual design is always based on UX. Do users consult the rank often? If not, the orange should be reserved for something else more demanding of the user's attention. Are the point totals interactive? If not, the 3D shading should be saved for use as an affordance somewhere where there is interaction. It's questions like these that turn a pretty visual design into something that not only looks but works great.
Semantics, but I think you are agreeing with your parent that there should be something deeper than the gloss applied in this redesign. That design must go more than skin-deep. Arguably the word “style” could refer to paint jobs, so your statement was fairly confusing.
I fully agree with your comments regarding the bizarre amount of visual attention demanded by the rank numbers here and the points’ affordance of clickability (and said as much on a comment there).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3870982
http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2tjm5GuRF1rtfgd6o1_1280.j...
http://textbookcentral.com.au/33/university-of-sydney/list/
(Admittedly the page numbers on the bottom are more for search engine crawlers than people)
Its simple and to the point.
I find it ironic that this submission is near the top of the front page at the same time as this (excellent) essay about startup culture (among other things) is also on the front page:
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...
The design of any website is supposed to be a reflection of your company culture. It needs to make the people you're trying to attract feel comfortable and at home. Sorry to be blunt, but this redesign does the exact opposite of that, for me at least.
Please don't take offense at this because it isn't meant toward you as a person; I fully support people doing redesigns of sites and posting them, but in this case I can't help but feeling like "dear god no." If you watch Rocky IV, the reason it's so easy to root for Rocky is that he's a product of his community, whereas the other guy is a product of some cold and unfeeling scientific process. Hacker News is a community, so you want a website that feels like something that a community would make. This redesign just doesn't do that.
My longer reply got lost somewhere.
Both engineering and design are instances of the same type of problem solving process. But because design is focused more on qualitative and subjective elements, its state space is much larger and, I believe, its design solutions (or attractors) more fuzzy. Because of this, design and engineering actualize themselves quite differently in real life, often requiring different skill-sets.
And I think that because the web and application design disciplines require more engineering-thinking -- architecture, for example, must also consider spatio-temporal qualities -- most design-thinking is delegated only to the most superficial facets of the process. What would really help understanding is for more designers to push into the engineering side of things, and more engineers into the design side of things.
That's really nice. It's not clear where the stylesheet is though. I'd love to use it, where might it be?
edit: waxjar already posted it further below.
Another thing I think the current HN design does well is act as a filter or repellent. Hackers can typically deal with an unattractive interface, whilst the average person would be turned off and leave the site. Those who stay on the site do so for its content, they don't need any extra convincing to stay.
Having said that, I haven't found a mockup I prefer over plain HN either. It's about the content. Design largely stays out of the way.
And yeah, insane spacing between the lines makes absolutely no sense.
The striped header is not more visually appealing than the current plain one.
Here are some thoughts on why I made mine this way:
1) Hacker news is read by hundred of thousands of people every month- to adapt to a completely new design would wreck the user experience the users have come to expect.
2) Your patterns and icons, while I appreciate the gesture takes focus away from the headlines. The most important thing should be the headlines on hacker news. That's how it was designed to be. Everything else should pale in color compared to it.
3) As SeoxyS mentioned, I designed mine as to not disrupt the functionality that everyone's used to. What I did was "design" the page to improve readability. I made the background color behind the text a light grey so it's not as gloomy as the current site and used a dark grey font rather than the black on current site to improve faster reading. Black on white is always tiring on the eyes, which is why I tried to adapt different shades of grey.
4) I don't like HN's top nav bar right now because it takes focus away from the logo. The logo should be consistent with the one found and recognized on YC's main site. A logo on the site should be loud and clear. I made the top nav bar a darker grey so that it would give focus back to the logo. 5) The selected links are now orange instead of white. By having tiny accents of color, it adds the kind of eye candy that you want but nonetheless tied in with functionality. UX comes first, then UI. You can make something pretty after think about how you'll first make it user-friendly.
6) To improve eye candy, I gave the bottom nav the bright color of HN to really lighten up the page. I felt that otherwise there would be too many grey areas.
7) I moved the search to the top and yes, this does change what the users are used to, but in my opinion a good change. I've read many posts where people (including myself) have had a hard time finding the search button. To move it to the top nav will adapt to web standards.
Normally, I'd make the search larger and start right aligned at the end of the top nav bar and instead move the username + logout link above it, but I felt that it might be too disruptive, so I sacrificed what looks the best for a better experience (this is important).
The main text is too light and low-contrast: it looks like it is frightened of being there and trying to run away and hide! (and so the most big and powerful thing on the page is the footer, which does not seem the right priority...)
I appreciate the feedback, and will definitely take it into consideration.
You are absolutely right. Eye candy can quickly become eye straining.
Hacker News is successfull not only because of its content but also because of its design. It's simple and pragmatic, as it should be. I always need only seconds to read the headlines of the whole page.
Hacker News, please don't change anything!
I think of a "story" as a narrative: a sequence of events involving characters. In an epic story, there's a hero, a quest, thresholds, guardians, a special world, obstacles, tests, allies, a shadow, a return etc. Could you elaborate on what "story" means in terms of design?
Eye candy doesn't help the user with navigation or add functionality but it can make a website look more professional and in-turn more trustworthy.
For e commerce websites getting the users trust is an important consideration and I'd argue eye candy is maybe just as important as the design.
Of course in the case of Hacker News I wouldn't like to see this kind of redesign implemented and would prefer the focus of the site's design to be solely on improving it's functionality and usability.
It works, but seems to subtract more than it adds. It looks a little less like itself, and a little more like every other site.
And what's the point of the huge margins on the one you linked to? Can't we make better use of the space somehow?
I think the OP has a helluva nice looking start to a website redesign, and I hope he doesn't get discouraged from the hivemind criticism I'm seeing on this page.
Actually, I believe that the simplified design of HN as it is currently helps ward off the typical Internet surfer looking for new links to click on. The last thing HN needs is to attract users who only post pictures of animals.
My single piece of design criticism for HN would be to provide a hi-res upvote triangle image (heck, why isn't it pure CSS?) for retina display devices.
You don't even need CSS, just an unicode character: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b2/index.htm
https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=https_3A_2F_2Fn...
- Why does "x Points" look like a button? The word "points" also does not need to be repeated for each item, or needs to be deemphasized in favor of the number.
- Comment links are all over the place and look like a river of grey blobs running down the page.
- Article titles need more emphasis than the previously mentioned elements
Though, i dislike the low-contrast browngray background. It's annoying for reading.
Make the layout user-customizable to each login. Let users choose. Is that too hard?
Nothing personal, but you are missing the most important point of existing design - it's the information density and the lack of any whitespace whatsoever. Whatever the redesign it needs to preserve 20+ stories per page, it's a must.
On a broader topic, though, many of the commenters appear to view style and substance as opposing forces. O hackers, can we not have both the functionality and the form? The presence and organization of information does not fundamentally conflict with rounded rectangles, smoother fonts, CSS buttons and all the other jazz that populate our startup pages.
Arguing that the ugliness of the current design improves the quality of the user base is the online equivalent of wearing coke bottle glasses because it makes you look nerdier. Let's present our services as both sexy and smart.
Current HN has too wide with respect to font size neither. :(
On the other hand, for a site designed for self described "hackers", I think having a very utilitarian as-simple-as-possible not-trying-to-impress-you design sends the message that "appearances don't matter here, the content is the focus"