Hacker News UX Review — July 2018
If you’ve written a line of code in the last decade, it’s pretty likely that you’ve heard of Hacker News. It’s tempting to call it a certainty but there are a lot of outliers in the hacker community so I’ll settle for pretty likely.
The thing that draws me to Hacker News is the raw function and defiant nature of the community as a whole. Few designers would call Hacker News beautiful. Few UXers would say the interface is an intuitive marvel. But hackers and engineers don’t seem to care. They’ve been coming back to the watering hole since 2007.
Here are a few improvements I believe Hacker News could make without losing their identity in a complete redesign.
Full-width comments aren’t very readable
I’m not going to invest the time to read comments with small text on lines 1200px wide. The perceived work required to gather that information just doesn’t seem worth it. Drop the line width to ~700px and suddenly it doesn’t feel so daunting.
Fixing this is literally 1 line of CSS:.comment-tree { max-width: 700px; }
