Hacker News Redesign
jsbin.comOne of the things I like about the existing Hacker News design is that it's simple and very easy to read. Your redesign uses smaller fonts, which, in my opinion, is definitely not an improvement.
Support this statement! Design that sacrifices content for sake of nice looking white-spaces can be used only on personal pages that nobody reads.
Whitespace doesn't exist just for the sake of being pretty. At least to me I find this mockup much more readable than the current design, as the space between links clearly separates them. This makes it much easier to read their titles.
I agree. My intention is to use white space to separate things, vs lines or other graphical distractions. Having said that, I still need to work on the list part of the design.
There will be less white space and it will be used more scarcely, however I'd rather use a little bit of white space instead of something like a horizontal line. Wouldn't you agree with this? :P
Really? On my computer it's the exact opposite. The HN design looks like the font is around 8pt; the redesign looks like it's around 11pt.
I opened up two, identical browsers (Chromium version 25) on my 27 inch IPS monitor. I opened up the redesign in one browser, and the regular Hacker News in the other. The redesign has visually, noticeably smaller fonts.
The real HN has 10pt titles and 7pt metadata, at least on my PC.
The redesign makes titles smaller and metadata larger, in effect making them the same size.
I think this is a bad change, because now there's little distinction between title and metadata.
I want to remove the metadata if I can. Would you agree that the titles and "comhead" (the domain name) should be the visually promenant part? My goal is to minimize on the meta as much as possible without removing the usefulness of it.
The font size is the same size for me. I do like the increased padding on the design.
Except for the god-awful vote buttons. They're even still image files as well.
Any redesign should make the voting buttons significantly larger. It is really hard to hit them on a tablet.
Agreed. Having feedback that the vote counted would be helpful as well. When I was getting used to my new tablet I'd select them, so they'd vanish, but moving or touching elsewhere would show the buttons again. Odd.
lol. I've been reading hackernews for years and didn't even know there was a voting button
hard to call it a redesign when it doesn't solve any problems.
It does by making important elements stand out (such as author, comments...). Bigger arrow which is sometimes tricky to hit.
The colors kinda kills the eyes though.
Author (submitter, really) and comments are the last two things I care about.
Yes, the nice thing about HN is the de-emphasis of the submitter...the content should stand on its own, not on the authority of whoever submitted it.
Number of upvotes is also irrelevant to emphasize. This attribute is inherently reflected in the vertical position of the item.
Edit: oops, OP did not emphasize upvotes. I'm ambivalent about holding number of comments...again, the number of them can mean several conflicting things
I usually visit http://hckrnews.com, I like the clean design there... But yours is a nice effort
My favourite too, simple, clean, and shows everything in an order that makes more sense. The latest changes to the site were excellent improvements as well!
Nice, clean and easy on the eyes. Showing the right information in the right place, cool.
I use this chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
It's probably not the prettiest but I like it.
What I like about this extension over the OPs proposal is that it gives emphasis to the title, not the metadata like author and comments. The font family and size choices are much better as well.
For those on a wide-screen monitor, it would be nice if you used all of the empty real estate on the right. Move everything up to a single line and take what is currently your second-line content (comments, vote count, etc) and push it all the way to the right. It'll make it a lot easier to scan the headlines. For mobile devices you could always revert back to the stacked approach.
While this might look nicer, it's solving one problem by creating another, and in my opinion larger, problem.
The problem when it comes to listings is that information needs to be easily scannable. The information to be scanned usually has a certain hierarchy, so there has to be a separation that reflects this hierarchy. If you use your solution, you favour optimal separation while sacrificing scanability.
This is not exactly a straight-forward problem to solve because the hierarchy is different for everyone. But one thing we can all agree on is that the title is at the very top of it. So, having the title in a bigger font-size, maybe bold, but definitely more contrasted as the stuff around it goes without saying. So the current HN style is not that far off the mark, though I think it could do with less data and/or more whitespace, to counter the "gray haze syndrome".
A straightforward fix for this meta-data clutter would be to make it collapsable, you could then show it in a tooltip on hover for example. Or make it collapsable on a per story basis to cater for tablet/phone users.
Why did you use Arial narrow in the Header and Footer? In my opinion this looks a bit crammed.
This fixes things that really aren't' broken and doesn't even attempt to fix the one big problem hacker news UI has.
The voting buttons are still too small.
Wow! I really didn't expect this much attention and feedback! First, I want to say thanks for all the comments!
I designed this last, late California night. So the design isn't finished; this is a first draft.
Obviously the posts themselves are an issue. I didn't put much attention to the posts. I'll do that. Some of the feedback I got on it were: 1. Larger vote buttons. 2. Less contrast (too hard on the eyes). 3. Too much white space, a little too small of text. 4. Focus on title, not author.
Some other feedback I got was on the orange color. I pulled this straight from HN's header bar. I guess because the bar is taller that the color is brighter. I need to think about if it's the color or the surrounding elements that make it feel this way.
Keep up the commenting and feedback. I'm not finished here yet. I really liked the HackerWeb design, but it's too narrow; it feels like a mobile app. I'll pull some inspiration from there, but I really want to bring the design back to a "hacker" feel. So stay tooned!
Personally I prefer the HackerNew Chrome extension. Really big links on the frontpage and collapsible comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
Oh wow, I'd always found myself wanting collapsable comments, this is nice.
Only thing is now for some reason chrome isn't displaying urls at the bottom of the page when I hover over links?
> Only thing is now for some reason chrome isn't displaying urls at the bottom of the page when I hover over links?
That's weird, probably on your end as it works fine for me.
The problem is that if you go for a clean (read: white-heavy) design, then you end up with black text on white background. I prefer the classic HN purely because it is (to me) a bit milder on the eye. Kudos for trying though.
I designed a slightly new Hacker News. Comment and let me know what you think.
I love the classic design :)
Me, too. I hope it never goes away in favour of flavour-of-the-month web design.
There's just enough space between articles and a ton of stuff fits on the screen at once. If it's not to your liking, there's a ton of alternative HN design services out there you can use.
There have been and will be many redesigns attempts of HN, when it actually doesn't need one. I wrote about it [1]. HN's design isn't neutral. It carries a message that is bigger than purely graphical appeal. Some UI elements could possibly be improved but these issues are probably too insignificant to spawn a whole redesign process that would impair HN's great usability.
This is how I use HN: http://i.imgur.com/IRzF5LQ.png
Browser: Chromium, Extension: "HipsterNews" -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hipsternews/midncc...
It's a copy of news.layervault.com, which copied news.yc in the first place. I'm sure there is some sort of joke in there somewhere.
I think larger fonts with more spacing in the list would be more readable:
I kinda prefer http://cheeaun.github.com/hackerweb/#/ though.
The orange at the top seems way too bright and the fonts are a tad small in my opinion.
I switched to Hacker News Enhancement Suite https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
This is my hn: http://jsbin.com/aronar/1. It uses my stylesheet from: https://raw.github.com/bjourne/readable-userstyles/master/ha...
I prefer bigger fonts. I also prefer off-white backgrounds and dark fonts, but still keeping high contrast. High contrast is good, but this is a bit much.
I really like the way it fits in my narrow browser window! Many redesigns don't.
And I like the bigger upvote button.
I prefer http://lessmeme.com/less.html
Same but different. And ugly?!
Looks good, I think fonts are too narrow. author name can be greyed out.
HN has a really nice hacker-ish design feel to it already so it's great. Just that it is not very tablet and mobile friendly with the really small buttons.
I'm going to design this thing into a Github page, but I need to get HN feed data. Could someone comment on where I could get HN data through an API?
A bit too much spacing for my liking, though maybe I am just pissed that google chrome new design has everything very separated at the moment.
Really like it visually, but I don't think there's enough attention on the actual titles. The eye doesn't catch the titles enough.
This is how I use it: http://i.imgur.com/uwKcrn5.png
This one is better. But still two things remain: 1. the font is a little tad too big by my preference. 2. The orange is a little too bright.
It seems this is editable, I will check back later to add my perception of HN.
Zooming in breaks the layout.
Perhaps related, on a Nexus 7 titles that wrap cause the comments line to lose their indentation.
pretty slick and nice! like it very much. it would be awesome if PG or someone takes time to get your design ported to the real HN :D
The the post title type is still too small.
Why the obsession with tiny fonts?
New version is hard on the eyes.
NOOO, it's too bright.