HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why HN is so ugly?

10 points by reinier_s4g ↗ HN
I'm a web developer and UI/UX "adventurer". I understand the idea behind the HN's UI is simplicity and that's cool, but, sometimes too simple is too simple. I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt. Let me just mention a few things I notice so you see what I mean:

1. Leverage Mobile: See HN in your mobile, can you read it to me please?

2. Padding: Look at the numbers to the left (numbers inside <td> tags, are you using a for loop? hehe), can you see they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway? I find it difficult to read and click the article I want to read, the posts are too close!

3. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process, not just for mobile...

4. The colors seem old-fashion and not in a good way if you ask me but if that's the branding that's fine, just do it right. For instance, look at the top-menu, open up your browser's inspector and change the color to white, much better ah? The "active" can be something else.

5. I would underline the article links on hover, it makes it easy to see what you are clicking.

6. The gamification controls are weird. Example: 126 points by user 1 hour ago | 26 comments ... See how it looks like "user" gave 126 points to the article? What about: by user 1 hour ago | 126 points | 26 comments ?

7. Separation: Maybe enclose the articles in boxes of some kind or just throw a line between the articles, it is so close and compact...

8. Submission form: why not adding some optional WYSYWYG goodies? If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?

9. Ah, TABLE seriously?

These are just some of my findings (2000 chars limit). I would recommend other kinds of ordering, ability to curate the listings somehow, etc, but for now let's focus in the UI/UX. I'm hereby offering my services as developer to make this happen, let me know!

24 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] thread
reinier_s4g
ooops, and what about the auto-formatting of the posts? look how all my newlines were removed :| I know, i guess i could have used some HTML tags there, but really?
ColinWright
Your questions have been asked many times, both about the look'n'feel, and the formatting. The answers you seek are already here, if only you'd take the time to look.
reinier_s4g
Thanks for your reply, I just fixed the formatting of my question, still think that patching with more newlines is uncool though. Also, mine is more a proposal than a question...
001sky
mine is more a proposal than a question...

The title> "Why is HN so ugly..."

Is a statement, more than either a proposal or a question.

It's also presumptuous.

Minimalism is a feature.

Like exclusivity.

reinier_s4g
Sorry, it wasnt my intention to be presumptuous, just wanted to get your attention and looks like i have, so mission accomplished! :) I understand minimalism is a feature and actually is one feature i love, as you can see i'm not proposing getting rid of the minimalistic look and adding lots of easter bunnies everywhere or anything, i'm just focusing on readability and the most basic things, wouldn't you agree HN can benefit from this?
ColinWright 

  > ... just wanted to get your attention and
  > looks like i have, so mission accomplished!
Yup - I'll certainly remember you, although maybe not for the reason you wanted.
ColinWright
You have asked a question, and then actually presented a bunch of proposals based on your biases and non-understandings of both the aims and the audience. Many, many proposals have been made for "improving" the interface. People have presented many alternatives. None have stuck, all have been critiqued. I you did some research you would see their fate.

Are you so sure you really do know better?

  > "I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt."
Then write your own style sheets and GreaseMonkey script (or equivalent) to fix your rendered. When you're convinced you've got it right and it's significantly better, then offer it.

And best of all, do some research on previous answers to this question and present a "proposal" that actually addressed the previous discussions.

reinier_s4g
> "Then write your own style sheets and GreaseMonkey script (or equivalent) to fix your rendered"

Have you seen the HN HTML layout and CSS code?

I'm doing some research on previous posts regarding the HN interface, but judging by some answers i'm getting in this post i can imagine their fate, why plainly criticize instead of brainstorming about the proposed ideas and trying to get to a common ground? Maybe even some sketches done? (I'm working on mine as i write btw) ... according to you what are the aims and audience? I think you are implying you know the aims and audience better? can you please share? I'm part of the audience as well...

ColinWright
Yes, I've written scraper code that deconstructs the existing pages and inserts the data into a database. Your point?

I've also seen this question many, many time, looked at the proposed "improvements," and read the many discussions about the whole issue. Broadly speaking, lots of people have preferred the existing version to those proposed, often by a substantial margin. Regularly people say that it looks horrible, never have a seen something I prefer.

Feel free to try. Good luck.

reinier_s4g
Right, we all have done crawling and scraping, I even have my own framework build for it, man do I love that stuff... but if you think that's the right way to go about it we are just not in the same page.

I understand you like HN as it is, and i guess an idea would be to have optional themes, that will be more democratic.

krapp
The weird thing is, at a certain karma level, you can change the top bar color.

And that's it, as far as I know. You can't even change the top bar text color as well. It's like the one user-editable part of this site is also the least useful feature imaginable.

ColinWright 

    I have made this letter longer than usual,
        because I lack the time to make it short.

        -- Blaise Pascal
           Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), no. 16.
           (According to WikiPedia[1])
I've replied at considerable length - despite its blunt tone and clear disagreement I hope you accept it in the constructive spirit in which I intend it. It's too long to include here, so I've posted it elsewhere[0].

[0] http://www.solipsys.co.uk/Writings/HN_7617061.txt

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn%27t_re...

DanBC
Use extra linefeeds to get proper line spacing for lists. Or use some spaces before each line to format as code.

Your auestion has been asked and answered quite a lot before, so you might find some interesting answers if you search.

underyx
10. The measure for submission text and comment text is way too long (as in, full width.)

11. A large part of the style is defined via attributes.

wetafur
Perhaps you should make a quick mockup to show how your redesign would look.
read
The most important thing you can understand is that these concerns aren't the most important thing to worry about. Content is more important. Though, if you had to pick only one feature to work on next, mobile might be it. As for the rest:

2. they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway?

Why not? Besides the numbers telling you which page you are on, they also show how a story progresses in time.

3. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process

Bigger does not equal better.

4. The colors seem old-fashion

The colors make the site readable. Readability is more important than fashion.

7. it is so close and compact.

That could be intentional. It focuses attention, for example.

8. If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?

Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

9. Ah, TABLE seriously?

Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error.

http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html

krapp
>Bigger does not equal better.

It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.

For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.

>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.

>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error

Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because there's already an element for that.

Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.

reinier_s4g
2. Agreed, so we leave the numbers along, but some spacing won't harm.

3. Right, not always, but in this case i think it will, things will get more readable.

4. Well, i think the current colors doesn't make the site specially readable, not that it makes it unreadable, just that it doesn't specially help with readability.

7. In my experience if you put a lot of content on top of each other with almost no spacing people will just get lost, luckily HN's audience is not the common folk, but does that justifies this?

8. I don't think adding a character counter or just a message letting you know will overflow the cognitive load, and the user hitting submit to find it out is just wrong IMHO.

9. Hmm, tables are the tables of HTML, <ul> and <ol> are lists of HTML.

PeterWhittaker
I reject the premise of the question. For the most part, I find HN far more usable than most web sites1.

My operational definition of "usable"? It is easy and effortless to scan headlines, to scan articles, and, when I find something of interest, to switch mentally from scan to read mode. And - and this is very important to me - it works well with the FF extension I use to mark all unvisited links as read, so that I don't notice them next time1.

Most other web sites are simply too busy, too loaded, trying to hard to impress to usefully support this scan, open-in-new-tab, then read mode of operation (I still do it elsewhere, but it requires more effort on all other sites than HN).

Is HN ugly? I honestly have no idea. Maybe it is, but it stays out of my way, so I don't care.

1 use hckrnews.com to find articles to read - by opening in new tabs - simply because it has more articles on one page than HN; really, that's it: If the main HN page was longer, I'd visit it once, just like I do with hckrnews.com, then alt-f2 to mark all as read - as it is, I have to scan-open-altF2-next-repeat, which is tedious. Not effortful, but not seamless, either.

shearnie
I'm always zooming in and tilting my phone to landscape when reading HN comments. The comments section I read the most and it sucks on mobile.
BinaryAcid
It's ironic. We're all about disrupting and innovation except for our own sacred link sharing site. The answer you will get every time from these guys: Its good enough. Some perspective: Its 2014 and HN isn't mobile friendly #wtf
krapp
I think there is an argument to be made that a site like this can be both minimalist and accessible, and that the dichotomy between a feature-rich HN and a HN with quality comments is possibly false, borne out of a lingering fear of a slippery slope leading to Reddit. Elitism may play a part in that - a better looking, more accessible site might by definition attract more people, and more people would dilute the quality of the discussion pool. I've seen 'features' like the awkward structure of nested comments, the broken pagination, etc. described (granted, by people who probably wouldn't actually know) as ways of keeping the riff-raff at bay.

OR maybe it's essentially a hobby site written to justify an obscure and difficult to wrangle Lisp dialect that only a couple of people ever work on, and it's literally not worth the time for at least one of them to tweak.

I think dang has mentioned they're working on adding some stuff anyway so... who knows?