Re:DevOps: An idea so good, no one admits they don’t do it
by barnabee on Monday August 29, 2022 @05:51PM
(#32644011)
String disagree.
The only of those complaints I even half recognise is the voting buttons on mobile, but I miss them rarely enough that I’d probably still rather not give up any more screen real estate (horizontally or vertically) or add an extra click.
Otherwise HN has basically the UX I wish every site had.
Re:DevOps: An idea so good, no one admits they don’t do it
by dTal on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @07:26AM
(#32649003)
The vote buttons are almost unusably miniscule and close together on desktop as well. There's not much excuse for it when so much of the visual real estate is empty space.
Frankly, neither programmers nor graphic designers are qualified to make good UI decisions. Human factors is a real field that people get PhDs in. You really can't just wing it, especially if you're a programmer whose mind has been thoroughly addled by decades of using programmer-designed UIs from the Nth circle of hell.
The default font size is unreadably small, it's impossible to reliably tap on upvote without accidentally hitting downvote on mobile screens, comments with code blocks with too many characters in a line break the width of the interface, huge comment threads indented 15 times aren't collapsed by default, downvoted comments lighten to become unreadable, I could go on.
But there's no decent alternative for HN's content and community, so we put up with the terrible decade-old interface because we don't have a choice. Although people are constantly inventing their own clients for it precisely because it's so terrible.