Breadth or Depth? Trade-off Behind Newsfeed UI design (part one)
Newsfeed has intruded every one’s daily lives. No matter you are flipping Facebook, Snapchat, or even just browsing a news site like Hacker News, BuzzFeed and so on, the first mobile view comes to your mind is feed list. Have you ever thought over how such newsfeed is arranged and designed will impact how you read them and what you should focus on. Hmm…That’s such a subtle UI details compared with the complex functionality behind the scene, but that does matter, and actually in my opinions, matters a lot.
We came from an age of plain text newsfeed when almost every website arranged and presented their contents in the way much similar to how Hacker News and Reddit are doing right now:
Most of the reasons behind are simple, because of no fancy website styling method support. At their “golden” age, they don’t have grid-layout Bootstrap, or more recently FlexBox-based CSS styling inside the toolbox, basically the web developers back then, especially user interface designers, are only playing with poor DOM elements, choosing which plain colour look better and done. Simple is better, as being said. However, the simplicity back then is most because of constraint and lack of choices, rather than design and art philosophy.
With more web develop technology blossomed, people are’t simply satisfy with plain text UI interface, but instead turn to more fancy, interactive elements playing with fingertips, if possible, every website should be highly virtualised and playable, or as more entertaining as better, isn’t it?
Then interesting question comes, why exactly HackerNews still exists? Except for the fact that it provides daily VC and tech insights and discussion and therefore aggregates lots of popularity, it receives much more favours to keep its newsfeed styling than we ever thought. Just why, in such age of rich-media-based visual presentation, HackerNews wins applause on its plain old look either?
The answer, in my opinion, boils down to what functionality this website wants to provide at the very first stage, what’s the main purpose when people are browsing the website, for educational use or simply for entertainment? Clarify these questions should also justify why HackerNews insisted its feed list style and did a good job on that.
A more detailed explanation on the design philosophy behind newsfeed UI will be presented in next part of the article series. Thank for reading.
