And yet it works.

The problem is designers and their bosses/clients. They equate design with looks. As a result, they see design as solving the problem of aesthetic. They fail to realize this is a problem which very few people care about on the web. So long as it passes the smell test of credibility, no one cares. (Excluding a handful of cases.)

As a result, we, the users, must suffer.

That‘s true only for (some) tech-literate people. Everyday users will quickly think something looks ugly/old/cluttered when compared to the other apps/sites they use.

I‘m an outlier on this site because I generally like redesigns and all that comes with modern web stuff (white space, rounded corners, flat, light drop shadow, generally clean and option for dark mode).

I find it‘s easy to test. Take a redesign you didn‘t think was necessary and then look at it 3 years later. Design changes over time. It‘s just life.

HN for some reason did age decently because it‘s very spartan and minimal. I like it. Even mobile is fine for reading. Not so much for contributing though.

Edit: Actually, everyday users might not care much either way. UNTIL some other site with similar functionality comes along but looks much more modern. Or if the site is trying to get new users.

"I like" is precisely the mistake I am addressing.

Design is not about what one likes. It is about what helps one solve a problem.

Web designers and their bosses/clients reduce "design" to the creation of the look-and-feel of websites. For them, design is all about how something looks. This is something which is highly subjective.

The flaw in this is that it's not how users think. Users have a job-to-be-done. A good design is one that helps them accomplish that job. A better design is one that helps them accomplish that job better, faster, or easier. A bad design is one which doesn't help them or makes it worse.

Consider a monolingual English speaker using an ATM in China. You will never hear them say, "Well, I can't get my money because I don't understand Chinese. However, this ATM looks so nice I'm going to try to use it again."

It doesn't matter how great that ATM looks if the user cannot accomplish their task.

Yes, aesthetics have a place, but it's a very diminished place of importance. Aesthetics is much less important than most web designers and bosses/clients think.

It's time they get over themselves and start thinking about users.

Early to mid 2000s was the best time in web design. Everything before that was "omg, i can put animated images and color on the web, LETS PUT ALL OF THEM IN THERE!" (aka the Geocities School of Style) and after after that was "OMG iPhone is kewl, lets make everything 20x sized so that people can rub their screens with ease (desktop? what desktop? that is sooo yesterday, and dying, get with the times grampah, today real programmers make web applications in their iPads while drinking latte soda cappuccinos and eating gluten free croissants at plate free coffee shops with hand demoisturized tables)".

I mean, early/mid 2000s design was still bad (especially when people learned about the gradient tool and drop shadow filter), but at least browsers were limited enough to mostly contain the damage.

I tend to agree, there is no reason to change the hn look and feel. If it were a corporate product it would have had a dozen product managers trying to make a name for themselves in redesigning it ad nauseum, just for the sake of change and advancing their own careers. Also see: Wikipedia (more or less), Craigslist, DuckDuckGo (I’ll defend that one), and scant few others. News sites like newspapers and large blogs are particularly egregious imo (but I think much of that is driven by demands for revenue by selling more ads and tracking).

HN was designed in the mid 2000s and has changed very little and that’s a good thing.

Just for grins and giggles, I occasionally charge my first gen iPod Touch from 2007. Most web pages are unusable - except for HN and daringfireball.

I have no affiliation with the site below. I just saw it on Show HN a few years ago.

http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com

> The mobile UX here is non existent.

It doesn't have any specialist mobile UX, but it also doesn't have any need for specialized mobile UX. It has pretty nearly the best mobile discussion UX I've seen simply by not trying too hard.

I have to zoom to click things.

It has clean UX for desktop. Which thankfully translates to mobile good enough because we built mobile concepts to deal with it (zooming).

But no, that doesn't mean it has mobile UX.

HN works really well on mobile. The only issue is that the voting arrows are a bit small but otherwise it is one of the mobile sites I use with the best UX experience.

Also you have to use a mobile browser that isn't fundamentally broken in it's handling of <pre> tags, which some people apparently won't or can't.

  # Otherwise the ends of really long lines scroll off the side of your phone and
  # you can't read them because your browser is a piece of junk.

The only other way to handle <pre> tags is to wrap these long lines, but i do not see how that is not fundamentally broken considering that the entire purpose of the <pre> tag is to show preformatted text.

What’s the expected behavior? I have to swipe to scroll the text.

I disagree. I browse hn almost exclusively on mobile and I think it is fantastic. Compared to other sites, many of which won’t even load when my connection is shoddy, jump around as they’re loaded, require me to turn off my ad blocker just to render properly, etc., and I’ll take hn’s mobile UX any day. Two examples of terrible “modern” mobile UX are (new) reddit and LinkedIn.

Yea but I'm not asking for a react rewrite I'm asking for fonts and UI elements to not by microscopic or disappear on me when I misclick on the wrong microscopic thing.

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

And that's a bad thing, why?

That's a good thing.