Hey everyone!
I've implemented a modern, open-source interface for Hacker News and I'd love your input. The goal is to enhance the user experience and interface, making it more user-friendly and visually appealing.
Readit NewsReadit NewsI've implemented a modern, open-source interface for Hacker News and I'd love your input. The goal is to enhance the user experience and interface, making it more user-friendly and visually appealing.
It looks like the vote buttons were moved to the right to so that there would not be both vote buttons and post type icons on the left side of the post title. I would argue that vote buttons are more important and should get priority. Maybe remove the post type icons and instead add tags to post title? Then you can put the vote buttons back on the left side where they belong. If you do decide to keep the post type icons, there is way too much white space inside of the circles.
I don't understand why there is a "#" in front of the usernames. Hashtags are typically used to indicate topics rather than people. Unless this is sort of callback to IRC days where operators in front of names indicate server hierarchy.
If you are going to do all-white background I would like option to switch to dark mode.
I do like the timestamps though.
Usability for me is about speed and convenience--see my rendering[0] on the opposite end of the scale--all stories for the day loaded on one long page. Click the date heading for yesterday's. It was made for reading while commuting (with intermittent internet) years ago and I just kept using it on desktop.
[0] https://hackerer.news
I'm really good with frontend, but I only have quite limited design training. I can whip out a good non-dense layout pretty quickly.
On the other hand, pretty much every (good) information-dense layouts I ever worked with had to be properly designed by a professional.
Maybe the reason for that is just fashion, I'm constantly informed by what I see and it's easier to replicate, whereas something that "breaks the rules" needs a better professional.
Here here! But you're understating it.
Less information dense, and smaller fonts is an appalling use of type, and layout. These first principals about type, font, page layout, they are about readability, and scalability...
We have 600 years of printing, of typography to lean on. Thats 600 years of refinement on line length, spacing and size. The human eye didn't evolve in the last two decades all these lessons still apply!
What are the top user pain points your solution is attempting to address (i.e. what are your product requirements)?
Better layout on mobile, more accessible actions, keyboard shortcuts, all those things say "modern" to me, and would be very welcome. Making the background white and adding 100px of empty space between each paragraph, less so.
IMO the date is alright when you're seeing multiple ungrouped items from different days, or for closely inspecting when something was posted. But when a list has items that are mostly from the same day, I personally find the full date redundant and distracting. I mostly focus on the hours and am always bit afraid that I might "miss" that one item is from a totally different day, since my eye is in the hours/minutes.
I would prefer just the hour to be there, but what I find even better is the "X minutes ago" format (when everything is mostly from the same day), as even the full hour makes me do a bit of metal calculation.
Deleted Comment
Yes, that's what I mean by "everything is from the same day".
On this proposed format, I can see ten.
I believe the existing page is definitely more dense than it needs to be, but I don't think migrating to so much whitespace that it's 30% of the information that it was is a good ratio. I think I'd be happy with anything over 20 readable headlines (without scrolling) on a new format.
HN has the simplest, cleanest, no distractions, information dense UI i have seen. It perfectly suits the site and medium. I wish more sites would adopt this approach of "actual usefulness" rather than "prettifying" into a complicated broken mess.
There is an increasing number of websites which are becoming broken on iOS 14.3. https://thesaurus.com is another example; it used to work fine, until a few months ago, when they pushed a frontend update that now results in an "Unexpected application error"; not even partial functionality, only the error message is displayed.
I find revolting this culture of mandatory technology upgrades that add no real value.