# Hacker News Redesign

DevFeed: [Hacker News Redesign](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/hacker-news-redesign-30339.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.mdubakov.com/posts/hacker-news-redesign>)

Published: 2012-04-23T15:41:57Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Blog by Michael Dubakov](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/blog-by-michael-dubakov.md>)

Topics: [color](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/color.md>), [Chrome extension](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/chrome-extension.md>), [Extension](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/extension.md>)

Tags: [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [chrome-extension](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/chrome-extension.md>), [cognitive-load](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cognitive-load.md>), [color](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/color.md>), [design](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/design.md>), [information-density](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/information-density.md>), [redesign](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/redesign.md>)

## AI overview

The article presents a redesign of Hacker News intended to make posts easier to scan. It encodes post age with color and point counts with circle size, uses larger titles and aligned comments, and hides detailed values until needed.

## Source excerpt

I read the post about Hacker News re-design and didn't like it. The resulting design is not good. It might be better than original design for large screens, but it distracts people from information. Orange numbers, large vote buttons, quite poor information density... I am not a designer, but the problem looks quite simple and interesting. Here is my attempt to create a better design for Hacker News. I am aware about some weak sides in this solution and will enumerate them in the end, be patient and don't fight back right away. First, I asked myself, how people decide that an article is worth they attention? The process is close to this one: Read the title - is it interesting to me? Check points - how other people voted? Check comments - are there any hot discussion? Check age - is it fresh or not? Check source - is it credible? (well, this is somewhat stretched) Currently you have to scan through all numbers of points, comments and age, but that is quite slow. You have to read every number to do a comparison -- quite high cognitive load. Is there a better way? I think there is. I took two most important variables and encoded them: Age is encoded with color. Dark color - fresh news (less than an hour). Light color - old news (half a day or more). Points are encoded with size. Obviously, large circle shows that a post is popular. I took all points and age values from the first HN page and analyzed them. It appeared that 5 groups are enough for age, while 6 groups for points may work. Another idea was to highlight titles. Here I took a theme of Readable HN Chrome extension and modified it. Each news item is a "one-liner" with a large title, so you can scan items easier. Comments are aligned to speed up comparison as well. Here is the final result: You can find important and fresh articles really quickly. This design provides a high level view on all news. I explicitly removed numbers like 1..30 from the page. I don't think they are useful. Something much simpler can be a