Comment by Eji1700
3 days ago
Information density and ease of identification is the antithesis of "engagement" which often has some time on site metric they're hunting.
If you can find what you want and read it you might not spend 5 extra seconds lost on their page and thus they can pad their stats for advertisers. Bonus points if the stupid page loads in such a way you accidentally click on something and give them a "conversion".
Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.
> Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.
Northstar should be user satisfaction. For some products that might be engagement (eg entertainment service) while for others it is accomplishing a task as quickly as possible and exiting the app.
The one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text.
HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I could do it myself, and I do. But "I fixed it for me" doesn't fix it for anyone else.
I use HN zoomed in at 133%. Its a lot more comfortable even when I'm wearing my glasses.
Increased padding comes at the cost of information density.
I think low density UIs are more beginner friendly but power users want high density.
High information density, not high UI density.
Having 50 buttons and 10 tabs shoved in your face just makes for opaqueness, power user or not.
I agree. In my experience, the default HN is terrible for accessibility (in many ways). I’ve just been waiting for dang and tomhow to get a lot older so that they face the issues themselves enough times to care.
A narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text rather than being irregularly shaped and covering 3-5 lines. I find Wikipedia articles much harder to read in "standard" mode compared to "wide" mode for this reason.
Different people process visual information differently, and people reading articles have different goals, different eyesight, and different hardware setups. And we already have a way for users to tell a website how wide they want its content to be: resizing their browser window. I set the width of my browser window based on how wide I want pages to be; and web designers who ignore this preference and impose unreadable narrow columns because they read about the "optimal" column width in some study or another infuriate me to no end. Optimal is not the same for everyone, and pretending otherwise is the antithesis of accessibility.
The user should have the choice. If I wanted my browser to display text in a tiny column on my monitor because I thought it would be easier to read, I would... resize my browser to be a tiny column on my monitor!
Why would shorter lines be regular? I use hn with `max-width: 60rem;`, and I get a ragged right (which I very much prefer over justification), while also getting a line length easier for my eyes to follow.
3 replies →
Naturally. Centuries of typography as a field and your anecdote obliterates it.
2 replies →
There are dozens of alternative HN front ends that would satisfy your needs
I’d very much prefer more padding between the clickable UI elements on mobile in particular, because the zoom in -> click upvote -> zoom out, or the click downvote by accident -> try to unvote -> try to upvote again, well, it gets pretty old pretty fast.
The text density, however, I rather like.