When I first visited Hacker News, I was a little offput by the design, but quickly embraced it after discovering the quality of content. I now see this as an advantage, as it can turn away undesirable users that would not add quality to our conversations. I can't guess really whether this effect is true, but anything that could keep this from turning into reddit or digg would be great.
I don't think the current one looks bad. I would even say the design is great. Maybe not aesthetically, but its very functional and is consistent with the purpose of the site.
The proposed redesign has too much transitional volatility associated with it. Although functional, subtracting from the current width makes the site look weird. Theres also too much text on the front page which is a departure from the way forums typically work with just the thread title (submission) and other essential info (comments, etc.).
Sadly, the underlying table structure and layout of the site isn't condusive to this. I spent a few days earlier this year trying to write an iPhone interface for HN by just modifying existing styles and it didn't work out so well.
Aside from functionality issues mentioned elsewhere, you have some problematic UI issues to work through.
For one, it took me 3 tries to click "expand" in the little preview box. I kept overshooting with my mouse, and then the box would close. More padding around the expand link or a 1 second delay on closing the popup would probably help a lot.
Can you put the code for this on GitHub or something? Might get some interesting results if anyone could fork it and make changes to either the style and/or functionality and push it back...Just an idea.
One (possibly unintentional) shortcut for me: your "content" button enables me to see what's blocked by the web filter at work. I'll bookmark this for the next time that happens. Thanks.
I don't like it. Usually the first paragraph of text is meaningless. Just look at the current entries for .hn from Wikipedia. Unless someone hand curates that kind of thing it's impossible to get right. It looks like you're trying to add in a link/subject/description model for submissions like Digg and all other social news sites. Sorry, but that isn't HN. Personally I prefer scanning the headlines. This blobby text insertion just makes that impossible. If you were going to put anything as a short description, it should be the highest rated comment currently on the thread. I'm also not sure why you replaced the upmod icon. That darn little thing has always been too small, but at least it indicates what it's for. If anything, make the icon bigger but don't change it's shape for no reason.
I agree adding the comments would be great, but without html scraping Hacker News it's not possible. I didn't want to reproduce HN only show that adding more context around a link will change a user's behavior around that link.
I would disagree that the first paragraph is meaningless. The title alone is generally not enough to make an accurate guess on whether a link is useful.
I disagree about the first paragraph bit. In every case where showing something like that works, it's setup so the poster can add such a description. Examples would be Slashdot, which is often a long form summary, and Digg, which is short form. Here on HN there is no summary. This encourages short, accurate, descriptive subjects. The base argument I'm trying to express is that either model works well, as long as it's human edited. However, automatically grabbing a semi-random chunk of text and displaying that as the descriptive paragraph isn't useful and makes reading the headlines difficult.
The icon is changed because it doesn't do the same thing. Try the site again and click the +. It expands the article, it don't upmod the article. This is a little confusing, how would you handle it? Maybe put the + under the title?
Exactly, its cluttered and I could not stay more than 5 mins. I appreciate the effort and if we keep trying may be we will get better interface. As of now I would stick to HN.
