Sorry for ranting, but this type of modern webdesign and "user interface" is _horrible_.
Who in their right mind thinks that putting a button called "Show me the list" dead center of the page? Hey guys, I have a novel idea: instead of adding a button, just _show_ me that list!
And do you know what happens if you press that button? The website scrolls down a ~300 pixels and then you can see the first 1.8 entries of that list!? F*ck this shit! You have ~900 vertical pixels at your disposal and all you manage to do is to show me TWO lousy items?
I actually tried to scroll down the list and it took me FORTYFOUR (!) scrolls of my mouse wheel to reach the end of the page. 44 scrolls to see a list of just 40 items?! This is horrible! In what world do you live if you think that this is a good user experience.
There is a lot of stuff killing the web right now, but one of the things nobody ever talks about is this horrible "modern" design which is nothing more than a wasteland of white padding, waste of space, way too large fonts and oversized picture banners which take way too much bandwidth too load.
In my opinion we should introduce a whitespace-to-content or padding-to-content ratio which punishes bad webdesign.
Another offender for this is medium.com. Yes, it has good content, but you have to hunt for it in the wast amount of padding and oversized images.
Just go and have a look at the mediums frontpage. What do you see? A few words, two buttons and a large image. In order to see any content you have to scroll down and even then they manage to only show you 2 items at the same time. If you want to see more you have to scroll constantly.
I strongly disagree. While I'm usually also one to rail against extraneous whitespace, I think it's important to consider the purpose of the list.
For example, if I'm searching for a contact in a contact list, I want as little whitespace as possible, because I want to be able to quickly scroll to an individual item very quickly. This is really a "searching for one item in a list" use case.
In this example, 99% of users won't be looking for any one specific thing. The whole point of the site is to show new stuff you aren't aware of. In that context, the fact that the scrolling behavior optimizes for stopping at each item it turn (lots of whitespace, the animated fade-in) is a benefit, because I won't know anything special about one product versus another.
Also, the experience is clearly optimized for mobile. And the type of "daydream and browse" experience that this site is geared towards screams mobile use case.
I exited the list very fast. I wanted to quickly skim over it to find products of interest, then consider the promising ones. That took far too long, so I just left.
Yes, exactly! The only reason why I actually scrolled all the way down was to figure out how many scrolls it takes to get to the bottom. Otherwise I would have just left after the 5th item.
And to pile on, whose bright idea was it to add items that aren't even available? Cinder, Eight, and Nebia look cool and all, but summer 2016 is a little too late for a holiday gift, n'est-ce pas?
It was my (Jessica Livingston) idea. I'm giving one of these as a gift to someone who will love it and am simply printing a picture of it. Not as great as the real thing on Christmas Day for sure, but I'm hoping they'll still be pleased.
I actually liked it. It requires you to scan each item when I would have scanned/skipped most of them in a giant list without really understanding them.
It is interesting to see how this post slowly climbed up to 12 points in the first 2 hours and then got downvoted afterwards to currently 0 points. It seems to be a controversial topic.
Because it feels cramped. Just imagine your ebook reader would only show you two lines of text at a time. Yes, you could concentrate on each line without being distracted but the overall flow is broken.
Or to use a different terminology: when you read a website or a book you use two modes of "scrolling" at the same time. The rough scrolling is done by hand when you change a page of the book or when you scroll down the website with your mouse wheel. The finer scrolling is done by moving your eyes which scan the available content for interesting stuff.
In my opinion scrolling by eye is much more effortless and faster than scrolling by hand so I'd like to try to reduce scrolling by hand as much as possible.
For example on the yc gift page it takes about 44 mouse scroll actions to see 40 items. In contrast I can see all 30 items on the front page with just 1 or 2 mouse scroll actions.
A practical example is this German news page: http://m.focus.de If you visit it on mobile you will see that they managed to show less than 2 full news items per page (At least on my 720p screen). Half a year I visited that page from time to time but now it is completely unusable because you have to scroll way too often.
Afterwards go to http://www.reddit.com/.compact and see how much more comfortable browsing is when you can see 7-10 items at the same time.
It's a different mode of attention. You're optimizing for consuming lots of information in a short amount of time.
But design that optimizes for depth of engagement almost always performs better on metrics that ultimately matter. I'm not saying YCGifts is an outstanding example of this, but to pan the design of the site (and all large font, lots of whitespace designs in general) because it's not optimized for your scan-and-pan method of consumption is shortsighted.
Yeah, I was actually thinking about creating a page called "YouSuckAtWebdesign" and then just rant at random websites in the style of Dr. Cox from Scrubs. But I am not good at ranting so this will just stay a dream.
Who in their right mind thinks that putting a button called "Show me the list" dead center of the page? Hey guys, I have a novel idea: instead of adding a button, just _show_ me that list!
And do you know what happens if you press that button? The website scrolls down a ~300 pixels and then you can see the first 1.8 entries of that list!? F*ck this shit! You have ~900 vertical pixels at your disposal and all you manage to do is to show me TWO lousy items?
I actually tried to scroll down the list and it took me FORTYFOUR (!) scrolls of my mouse wheel to reach the end of the page. 44 scrolls to see a list of just 40 items?! This is horrible! In what world do you live if you think that this is a good user experience.
There is a lot of stuff killing the web right now, but one of the things nobody ever talks about is this horrible "modern" design which is nothing more than a wasteland of white padding, waste of space, way too large fonts and oversized picture banners which take way too much bandwidth too load.
In my opinion we should introduce a whitespace-to-content or padding-to-content ratio which punishes bad webdesign.
Another offender for this is medium.com. Yes, it has good content, but you have to hunt for it in the wast amount of padding and oversized images.
Just go and have a look at the mediums frontpage. What do you see? A few words, two buttons and a large image. In order to see any content you have to scroll down and even then they manage to only show you 2 items at the same time. If you want to see more you have to scroll constantly.
/rant