Another Unsolicited HN Redesign

My main issue with HN is that the comments link is a pain on touch devices. This redesign seems to make that link even smaller. Much of the value of HN lies in the amazing comments, so I would prefer that link to get almost equal prominence to the actual article. I also don&#x27;t understand how almost unreadably pale article titles make the page more usable.<p>To me this redesign is another case of making it prettier rather than more usable.

I like that you&#x27;ve been relatively conservative with the redesign and have clearly relied on established convention so that existing users can carry over their existing experience into the new UI.<p>I think it could use another fine-grained pass over each UI element to evaluate how important it might be to the user and whether the contrast&#x2F;size&#x2F;color&#x2F;prominence of the element matches your expected prioritization.<p>For example, the numbers along the side are large and high-contrast, but are pretty trivial for people browsing articles (ordering is meaningful, but specific numbering isn&#x27;t). On the other hand, commenting is a big part of HN, but is a very small and low-contrast part of the mockup, with no visual indication of how to access the comments.<p>I&#x27;d also have another pass at the color choices - white on orange and mid-gray on mid-gray can be pretty difficult to scan.<p>Great thinking on the filtering and top-level organization, though. There&#x27;s some good stuff in there

The article titles are way too light imo.

I&#x27;ve dealt with more than a few designers handling solicited corporate website redesigns and one of the most critical issues I see back are &quot;That looks really great, but where is our logo?&quot; Yours looks like a fine example of a pretty design but you&#x27;ve trampled all over their brand in favour of your own palette and taste. Different Y, different spacing, different colours. You&#x27;ve designed something for a different company.<p>That #FFF-on-#F60 Y is their brand. It&#x27;s what they have all over their offices, on their business cards, on their main website... Unless the client is looking to rebrand (for which I can see no reason), you need to use their existing trademarks. Branding is as important to the client as UX is to the user.<p>(And on a UX tack, there&#x27;s a severe lack of contrast in various places. You appear to have faded out the most important text on the entire page (the content) with no explanation why. Telling me &quot;Because I want it to fade in on mouseover&quot; is a fireable offence.)

kudos to you and great job being brave and sharing your work. takes courage to be that vulnerable.<p>having said that, it&#x27;s not working for me.<p>1. the article list is now 100px or so lower on the page because the top bar is so large. the top bar is more readable and usable, but i can&#x27;t remember the last time i clicked it, so i&#x27;d prefer to get to the articles more. 2. the numbers for each article (1,2,3,4) are the most prominent element, followed by the upvote. the article title is demoted. 3. the create account button is a tab. that doesn&#x27;t seem right to me. 4. the bottom orange footer now is a heavy-weight element that draws my eyes from the articles.<p>overall i feel like the articles ought to be the most important element and this takes away from the articles.<p>but, keep it up.

Things being ugly doesn&#x27;t mean bad design. There is no such thing as objectively good design because all designed objects live in a certain context. Hacker news is purposefully unattractive and the register forms are outdated because the site wants to attract a certain type of person. If you&#x27;re perturbed by the visual design then the community would probably benefit from not having you since the entire focus of the site is on the discussion that ideas generate. In that vein, it&#x27;s ridiculous that legibility was not a key focus of the redesign since the singular mode of interaction with the site is through text. Why is the text contrast so poor?

This is one of the more pleasant unsolicited redesigns of HN, because it keeps a lot of the subtlety that makes HN an easy site to return to constantly: a prioritization of the headlines and a deemphasis on username and points (the position of a story is more than enough of an indicator of the story&#x27;s current popularity). The bigger upvote arrows are nice, though I guess one could argue that ease-of-upvoting is not a priority.<p>My biggest complaint is the relatively massive header. I disagree that Search needs to be prioritized...in a news site, even the New York Times, I am hardly ever using the site search...if a news site is doing its primary job well (providing fresh links), then I almost never have the time or desire to search the archives. I&#x27;d say 50 to 80 percent of my search bar usage is mainly to complain about how many times a currently-trending story has been posted in the past. The search bar should stay at the bottom of the site, allowing the header to be a little more compact than it is in the OP&#x27;s proposal.

The hard part of redesigning HN is that we&#x27;re all so used to the current HN. Changing anything major becomes confusing, defeating the purpose of the redesign.<p>The reason I like this one is because it doesn&#x27;t break the structure or functionality, but by adjusting the size&#x2F;prominence of elements it becomes slightly easier to use. I&#x27;m not in love with all of it, but it holds true to the core of HN, which is disregarded by most redesigns.<p>That being said, using HN as it is feels like I&#x27;m in a terminal window. Designers would be reluctant to admit this, but the very functional text-heavy interface is very &quot;hacker-like,&quot; and I adore the lack of design.

My biggest gripe is that you can&#x27;t collapse threads a la Reddit.

The header buttons are too big for my taste. I prefer economy of screen space and that space should be going to articles, not buttons.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I consider this a user test, of sorts. The main changes I&#x27;m considering are:<p>- article text readability (this bothered many people) - header height - colors: #FFF-on-#F60 (thanks Oliwarner)<p>ZEM also brings up a really interesting point about user-specific vs site-wide entries.<p>Aiming to do a redesign with your suggestions and do more user tests. Thanks again y&#x27;all!

I like the modern look, but I actually think the UX suffers.<p>In your design, the focus is on the up vote arrow. I use HN for content discovery. So I think content is taking a second seat against up-voting in your design.

the &quot;frontpage&quot; label was an excellent idea. however, the redesign didn&#x27;t fix what i feel is the primary flaw with the top bar - user-specific and site-wide entries are not distinguished. i&#x27;d redesign it as<p>[ frontpage | new | show | ask | jobs || new comments || my threads | my submissions | submit ]<p>or maybe even move the &quot;my&quot; stuff to the right alongside the [ username (karma) | logout ] section.

I <i>freely</i> implemented it in HTML + CSS!<p><a href="http://francisco.io/demo/hn/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;francisco.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;hn&#x2F;</a>

<i>Heuristics basically means “best practices,”</i><p>heuristic: (adjective) using experience to learn and improve

Why not make a Stylish theme out of it? If you haven&#x27;t already done so that is.

How will this design look on a mobile device and other screen sizes?

What would visited and upvoted links look like?