We are rolling out some new designs for the post page:
Old:
New:
The key goal was to prioritize the most important information and declutter the page.
The most opinionated choice I made was to substantially de-emphasize karma at the top of the post page. I am not totally sure whether that is the right choice, but I think the primary purpose of karma is to use it to decide what to read before you click on a post, which makes it less important to be super prominent when you are already on a post page, or when you are following a link from some external website.
The bottom of the post still has very prominent karma UI to make it easy for people to vote after they finished reading a post (and to calibrate on reception before reading the comments).
This redesign also gives us more space in the right column, which we will soon be filling with new side-note UI and an improved inline-react experience.
The mobile UI is mostly left the same, though we did make the decision to remove post-tags from the top of the mobile UI page to only making them visible below the post, because they took up too much space.
Feel free to comment here with feedback. I expect we will be iterating on the new design quite actively over the coming days and weeks.
I really don’t like the removal of the comment counter at the top, because that gave a link to skip to the comments. I fairly often want to skip immediately to the comments to eg get a vibe for if the post is worth reading, and having a one click skip to it is super useful, not having that feels like a major degradation to me
The link is now on the bottom left of the screen, and in contrast to the previous design should consistently be always in the same location (whereas its previous position depended on how long the username is and some other details). I also care quite a bit about a single-click navigate to the comments.
Ah! Hmm, that’s a lot better than nothing, but pretty out of the way, and easy to miss. Maybe making it a bit bigger or darker, or bolding it? I do like the fact that it’s always there as you scroll
Even after reading this (2 weeks ago), I today couldn’t manage to find the comment link and manually scrolled down. I later noticed it (at the bottom left) but it’s so far away from everything else. I think putting it somewhere at the top near the rest of the UI would be much easier for me
Yeah, we’ll probably make that adjustment soon. I also currently think the comment link is too hidden, even after trying to get used to it for a while.
My impression: The new design looks terrible. There’s suddenly tons of pointless whitespace everywhere. Also, I’m very often the first or only person to tag articles, and if the tagging button is so inconvenient to reach, I’m not going to do that.
Until I saw this shortform, I was sure this was a Firefox bug, not a conscious design decision.
The total amount of whitespace is actually surprisingly similar to the previous design, we just now actually make use of the right column and top-right corner. I think we currently lose like 1-2 lines of text depending on the exact screen size and number of tags, so it’s roughly the same amount of total content and whitespace, but with the title and author emphasized a lot more.
I am sad about making the add-tag button less prominent for people who tag stuff, but it’s only used by <1% of users or so, and so not really worth the prominent screen estate where it was previously. I somewhat wonder whether we might be able to make it work by putting it to the left of the tagging list, where it might be able to fade somewhat more into the background while still being available. The previous tag UI was IMO kind of atrocious and took up a huge amount of screen real-estate, but am not super confident the current UI is ideal (especially from the perspective of adding tags).
I am sad about making the add-tag button less prominent for people who tag stuff, but it’s only used by <1% of users or so, and so not really worth the prominent screen estate where it was previously.
I really don’t understand the reasoning here. As I see it, tagging is a LW public good that is currently undersupplied, and the “prominent screen estate” is pretty much the only reason it is not even more undersupplied. “We have this feature that users can use to make the site better for everyone, but it’s not being used as much as we’d want to, so it’s not such a big deal if we make it less prominent” seems backwards to me; the solution would seem to make it even more prominent, no? With a subgoal of increasing the proportion of “people who tag stuff” to be much more than 1%.
Let’s make this more concrete: does LW not already suffer from the problem that too few people regularly tag posts (at least with the requisite degree of care)? As a mod, you should definitely have more data on this, and perhaps you do and believe I am wrong about this, but in my experience, tags are often missing, improper, etc., until some of the commenters try (and often fail) to pick up the slack. This topic has been talked about for a long time, ever since the tagging system began, with many users suggesting that the tags be made even more prominent at the top of a post. Raemon even said, just a over a week ago:
I notice some people go around tagging posts with every plausible tag that possible seems like it could fit. I don’t think this is a good practice – it results in an extremely overwhelming and cluttered tag-list, which you can’t quickly skim to figure out “what is this post actually about”?, and I roll to disbelieve on “stretch-tagging” actually helping people who are searching tag pages.
There should probably be guidance on this when you go to add a tag. When I write a post I just randomly put some tags and have never previously considered that it might be prosocial to put more or less tags on my post.
This certainly seems like a problem that gets solved by increasing community involvement in tagging, so that it’s not just the miscalibrated or idiosyncratic beliefs of a small minority of users that determines what gets tagged with what. And making the tags harder to notice seems like it shifts the incentives the complete opposite direction.
I am confused about the quote. Indeed, in that quote Ray is complaining about people tagging things too aggressively, saying basically the opposite of your previous paragraph (i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
My current sense is that tagging is going well and I don’t super feel like I want to increase the amount of tagging that people do (though I do think much less tagging would be bad).
It’s also the case that tagging is the kind of task that probably has a decent chance of being substantially automated with AI systems, and indeed, if I wanted to tackle the problem of posts not being reliably tagged, I would focus on doing so in an automated way, now that LLMs are just quite good and cheap at this kind of intellectual labor. I don’t think it could fully solve the problem and would still need a bunch of human in the loop, but I think it could easily speed up tagging efficiency by 20x+. I’ve been thinking about building an auto-tagger, and might do so if we see tagging activity drop out of making these buttons less prominent.
(i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
Right, but the point I was trying to make is that the reason why this happens is because you don’t have sufficient engagement from the broader community in this stuff, so when mistakes like these happen (maybe because the people doing the tagging are a small and unrepresentative sample of the LW userbase), they don’t get corrected quickly because there are too few people to do the correcting. Do you disagree with this?
I think it’s messy. In this case, it seems like the problem would have never appeared in the first place if the tagging button had been less available. I agree many other problems would be better addressed by having more people participate in the tagging system.
The new design seems to be influenced by the idea that spreading UI elements across greater distances (reducing their local density) makes the interface less cluttered. I think it’s a little bit the other way around, shorter distances with everything in one place make it easier to chunk and navigate, but overall the effect is small either way. And the design of spreading the UI elements this way is sufficiently unusual that it will be slightly confusing to many people.
I don’t really think that’s the primary thing going on. I think one of the key issues with the previous design was the irregularity of the layout. Everything under the header would wrap and basically be in one big jumble, with the number and length of the author names changing where the info on the number of comments is, and where the tags section starts.
It also didn’t communicate a good hierarchy on which information is important. Ultimately, all you need to start reading a post is the title and the content. The current design communicates the optionality of things like karma and tags better, whereas the previous design communicates that those pieces of information might need to be understood before you start reading.
Why remove “x min read”? Even if it’s not gonna be super accurate between different people’s reading speeds, I still found it very helpful to decide at a glance how long a post is (e.g. whether to read it on the spot or bookmark it for later).
Mostly because there is a prior against any UI element adding complexity.
In this case, with the new ToC progress bar which is now always visible, you can quickly glance the length of the post by checking the length of the progress bar relative to the viewport indicator. It’s an indirect inference, but I’ve gotten used to it pretty quickly. You can also still see the word count on hover-over.
I find a visual indicator much less useful and harder to reason about than a number, I feel pretty sad at lacking this. How hard would it be to have as an optional addition?
Maintaining many different design variants pretty inevitably leads to visual bugs and things being broken, so I am very hesitant to allow people to customize things at this level (almost every time we’ve done that in the past the custom UI broke in some way within a year or two, people wouldn’t complain to us, and in some cases, we would hear stories 1-2 years later that someone stopped using LW because “it started looking broken all the time”).
We are likely shipping an update to make the reading time easier to parse in the post-hover preview to compensate some for the lack of it not being available on the post page directly. I am kind of curious in which circumstances you would end up clicking on the post page without having gotten the hover-preview first (mobile is the obvious one, though we are just adding back the reading time on mobile, that was an oversight on my part).
Typically, opening a bunch of posts that look interesting and processing them later, or being linked to a post (which is pretty common in safety research, since often a post will be linked, shared on slack, cited in a paper, etc) and wanting to get a vibe for whether I can be bothered to read it. I think this is pretty common for me.
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Another thing I just noticed: on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Oh, yeah, sure, I do think this kind of thing makes sense. I’ll look into what the most natural place for showing it on hover is (the date seems like a reasonable first guess).
on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
I think this is really just a “any change takes some getting used to” type deal. My guess is it’s slightly easier to find for the first time than the previous design, but I am not sure. I’ll pay attention to whether new-ish users have trouble finding the triple-dot, and if so will make it more noticeable.
I don’t get a progress bar on mobile (unless I’m missing it somehow), and the word count on hover feature seemingly broke on mobile as well a while ago (I remember it working before).
Ah, I think showing something on mobile is actually a good idea. I forgot that the way we rearranged things that also went away. I will experiment with some ways of adding that information back in tomorrow.
I like this; I’ve found the meta-data of posts to be quite heavy and cluttered (a multi-line title, the author+reading-time+date+comments line, the tag line, a linkpost line and a “crossposted from the Aligned Forum” line is quite a lot).
I was going to comment that “I’d like the option to look at the table-of-contents/structure”, but I then tested and indeed it displays if you hover your mouse there. I like that.
When I open a new post, the top banner with the LessWrong link to the homepage, my username etc. show up. I’d prefer if that didn’t happen? It’s not like I want to look at the banner (which has no new info to me) when I click open a post, and hiding it would make the page less cluttered.
When I open a new post, the top banner with the LessWrong link to the homepage, my username etc. show up. I’d prefer if that didn’t happen?
I’ve never considered that. I do think it’s important for the banner to be there when you get linked externally, so that you can orient to where you are, but I agree it’s reasonable to hide it when you do a navigation on-site. I’ll play around a bit with this. I like the idea.
Noting that I use the banner as breadcrumb navigation relatively often, clicking LessWrong to go back to the homepage or my username to get a menu and go to my drafts. The banner is useful to me as a place to reach those menus.
Totally. The only thing that I think we would do is to start you scrolled down 64px on the post page (the height of the header), so that you would just scroll a tiny bit up and then see the header again (or scroll up anywhere and have it pop in the same way it does right now).
I am really missing the word counter. It’s something I look at quite a lot (less so on reading time estimates, as I got used to making the estimate myself based on the wordcount).
My overall review is, seems fine, some pros and some cons, mostly looks/feels the same to me. Some details;
I had also started feeling like the stuff between the title and the start of the post content was cluttered.
I think my biggest current annoyance is the TOC on the left sidebar. This has actually disappeared for me, and I don’t see it on hover-over, which I assume is maybe just a firefox bug or something. But even before this update, I didn’t like the TOC. Specifically, you guys had made it so that there was spacing between the sections that was supposed to be proportional to the length of each section. This never felt like it worked for me (I could speculate on why if you’re interested). I’d much prefer if the TOC was just a normal outline-type thing (which it was in a previous iteration).
I think I’ll also miss the word count. I use it quite frequently (usually after going onto the post page itself, so the preview card wouldn’t help much). Having the TOC progress bar thing never felt like it worked either. I agree with Neel that it’d be fine to have the word count in the date hover-over, if you want to have less stuff on the page.
The tags at the top right are now just bare words, which I think looks funny. Over the years you guys have often seemed to prefer really naked minimalist stuff. In this case I think the tags kinda look like they might be site-wide menus, or something. I think it’s better to have the tiny box drawn around each tag as a visual cue.
The author name is now in a sans-serif font, which looks pretty off to me in between the title and the text as serif fonts. It looks like when the browser failed to load the site font and falls back onto the default font, or something. (I do see that it matches the fact that usernames in the comments are sans serif, though.)
I initially disliked the karma section being so suppressed, but then I read one of your comments in this thread explaining your reasoning behind that, and now I agree it’s good.
I also use the comment count/link to jump to comments fairly often, and agree that having that in the lower left is fine.
I like most of the changes, but strongly dislike the large gap before the title. (I similarly dislike the large background in the top 50 of the year posts)
Well, the gap you actually want to measure is the gap between the title and the audio player (or at the very least the tags), since that’s the thing we need to make space for. You are clearly looking at LW on an extremely large screen. This is the more median experience:
There is still a bunch of space there, but for many posts the tags extend all the way above the post.
I understand that having the audio player above the title is the path of least resistance, since you can’t assume there is enough space on the right to put it in. But ideally things like this should be dynamic, and only take up vertical space if you can’t put it on the right, no? (but I’m not a frontend dev)
Alternatively, I would consider moving them vertically above the title a slight improvement. It is not great either, but at least the reason for having the gap is more obvious.
The above screenshots are done in a 1920x1080 monitor
Yeah, we could make things dynamic, it would just add complexity that we would need to check every time we make a change. It’s the kind of iterative improvement we might do over time, but it’s not something that should block the roll-out of a new design (and it’s often lower priority than other things, though post-pages in-particular are very important and so get a lot more attention than other pages).
The new design means that I now move my mouse cursor first to the top right, and then to the bottom left, on every single new post. This UI design is bad ergonomics and feels actively hostile to users.
I’ve been playing around with some ways to move the comment icon to the top right corner, ideally somehow removing the audio-player icon (which is much less important, but adds a lot of visual noise in a way that overwhelms the top right corner if you also add the comment icon). We’ll see whether I can get it to work.
It takes more vertical space than it used to and I don’t like that. (Also, the meatball menu is way off in the corner, which is annoying if I want to e.g. bookmark a post, though I don’t use it very often so it’s not a major inconvenience.) I think I like the new font, though!
Another minor annoyance I’ve since noticed, at this small scale it’s hard to to distinguish posts I’ve upvoted from posts I haven’t voted on. Maybe it’d help if the upvote indicator were made a darker shade of green or something?
If you get linked externally (which is most of LW’s traffic), you don’t know the title (and also generally are less oriented on the page, so it helps to have a very clear information hierarchy).
I do also agree the font is very large. I made an intentionally bold choice here for a strong stylistic effect. I do think it’s pretty intense and it might be the wrong choice, but I currently like it aesthetically a bunch.
The new UI is great, and I agree with the thinking behind de-emphasizing karma votes at the top. It could sometimes create inherent bias and assumptions (no matter whether the karma is high or low) even before reading a post, whereas it would make more sense at the end of the post.
The karma buttons are too small for actions that in my experience, are done a lot more than clicking to listen to the post. It’s pretty easy to misclick.
Additionally, it’s unclear what the tags are, as they’re no longer right beside the post to indicate their relevance.
The big vote buttons are at the bottom of the post, where I would prefer more of the voting to happen (I am mildly happy to discourage voting at the top of the post before you read it, though I am not confident).
I ~always want to see the outline when I first open a post and when I’m reading/skimming through it. I wish the outline appeared when-not-hover-over-ing for me.
I like the decluttering. I think the title should be smaller and have less white space above it. Also think that it would be better if the ToC was maybe just faded a lot until mouseover, the sudden appearance/disappearance feels too sudden.
I think making things faint enough so that the relatively small margin between main body text and the ToC wouldn’t become bothersome during reading isn’t really feasible. In-general, because people’s screen-contrast and color calibration differs quite a lot, you don’t have that much wiggle room at the lower level of opacity without accidentally shipping completely different experiences to different users.
I think it’s plausible we want to adjust the whitespace below the title, but I think you really need this much space above the title to not have it look cluttered together with the tags on smaller screens. On larger screens there is enough distance between the title and top right corner, but things end up much harder to parse when the tags extend into the space right above the title, and that margin isn’t big enough.
the primary purpose of karma is to use it to decide what to read before you click on a post, which makes it less important to be super prominent when you are already on a post page
I think the title is more important for parsing the content of an essay. Like, if a friend sends you a link, it’s important to pay a bunch of attention to the title. It’s less important that you spend attention to the karma.
We are rolling out some new designs for the post page:
Old:
New:
The key goal was to prioritize the most important information and declutter the page.
The most opinionated choice I made was to substantially de-emphasize karma at the top of the post page. I am not totally sure whether that is the right choice, but I think the primary purpose of karma is to use it to decide what to read before you click on a post, which makes it less important to be super prominent when you are already on a post page, or when you are following a link from some external website.
The bottom of the post still has very prominent karma UI to make it easy for people to vote after they finished reading a post (and to calibrate on reception before reading the comments).
This redesign also gives us more space in the right column, which we will soon be filling with new side-note UI and an improved inline-react experience.
The mobile UI is mostly left the same, though we did make the decision to remove post-tags from the top of the mobile UI page to only making them visible below the post, because they took up too much space.
Feel free to comment here with feedback. I expect we will be iterating on the new design quite actively over the coming days and weeks.
I really don’t like the removal of the comment counter at the top, because that gave a link to skip to the comments. I fairly often want to skip immediately to the comments to eg get a vibe for if the post is worth reading, and having a one click skip to it is super useful, not having that feels like a major degradation to me
The link is now on the bottom left of the screen, and in contrast to the previous design should consistently be always in the same location (whereas its previous position depended on how long the username is and some other details). I also care quite a bit about a single-click navigate to the comments.
Ah! Hmm, that’s a lot better than nothing, but pretty out of the way, and easy to miss. Maybe making it a bit bigger or darker, or bolding it? I do like the fact that it’s always there as you scroll
I can’t jump to the comments on my phone.
Ah, oops, that’s actually just a bug. Will fix.
Even after reading this (2 weeks ago), I today couldn’t manage to find the comment link and manually scrolled down. I later noticed it (at the bottom left) but it’s so far away from everything else. I think putting it somewhere at the top near the rest of the UI would be much easier for me
Yeah, we’ll probably make that adjustment soon. I also currently think the comment link is too hidden, even after trying to get used to it for a while.
My impression: The new design looks terrible. There’s suddenly tons of pointless whitespace everywhere. Also, I’m very often the first or only person to tag articles, and if the tagging button is so inconvenient to reach, I’m not going to do that.
Until I saw this shortform, I was sure this was a Firefox bug, not a conscious design decision.
The total amount of whitespace is actually surprisingly similar to the previous design, we just now actually make use of the right column and top-right corner. I think we currently lose like 1-2 lines of text depending on the exact screen size and number of tags, so it’s roughly the same amount of total content and whitespace, but with the title and author emphasized a lot more.
I am sad about making the add-tag button less prominent for people who tag stuff, but it’s only used by <1% of users or so, and so not really worth the prominent screen estate where it was previously. I somewhat wonder whether we might be able to make it work by putting it to the left of the tagging list, where it might be able to fade somewhat more into the background while still being available. The previous tag UI was IMO kind of atrocious and took up a huge amount of screen real-estate, but am not super confident the current UI is ideal (especially from the perspective of adding tags).
I really don’t understand the reasoning here. As I see it, tagging is a LW public good that is currently undersupplied, and the “prominent screen estate” is pretty much the only reason it is not even more undersupplied. “We have this feature that users can use to make the site better for everyone, but it’s not being used as much as we’d want to, so it’s not such a big deal if we make it less prominent” seems backwards to me; the solution would seem to make it even more prominent, no? With a subgoal of increasing the proportion of “people who tag stuff” to be much more than 1%.
Let’s make this more concrete: does LW not already suffer from the problem that too few people regularly tag posts (at least with the requisite degree of care)? As a mod, you should definitely have more data on this, and perhaps you do and believe I am wrong about this, but in my experience, tags are often missing, improper, etc., until some of the commenters try (and often fail) to pick up the slack. This topic has been talked about for a long time, ever since the tagging system began, with many users suggesting that the tags be made even more prominent at the top of a post. Raemon even said, just a over a week ago:
And in response, Joseph Miller pointed out:
This certainly seems like a problem that gets solved by increasing community involvement in tagging, so that it’s not just the miscalibrated or idiosyncratic beliefs of a small minority of users that determines what gets tagged with what. And making the tags harder to notice seems like it shifts the incentives the complete opposite direction.
I am confused about the quote. Indeed, in that quote Ray is complaining about people tagging things too aggressively, saying basically the opposite of your previous paragraph (i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
My current sense is that tagging is going well and I don’t super feel like I want to increase the amount of tagging that people do (though I do think much less tagging would be bad).
It’s also the case that tagging is the kind of task that probably has a decent chance of being substantially automated with AI systems, and indeed, if I wanted to tackle the problem of posts not being reliably tagged, I would focus on doing so in an automated way, now that LLMs are just quite good and cheap at this kind of intellectual labor. I don’t think it could fully solve the problem and would still need a bunch of human in the loop, but I think it could easily speed up tagging efficiency by 20x+. I’ve been thinking about building an auto-tagger, and might do so if we see tagging activity drop out of making these buttons less prominent.
Right, but the point I was trying to make is that the reason why this happens is because you don’t have sufficient engagement from the broader community in this stuff, so when mistakes like these happen (maybe because the people doing the tagging are a small and unrepresentative sample of the LW userbase), they don’t get corrected quickly because there are too few people to do the correcting. Do you disagree with this?
I think it’s messy. In this case, it seems like the problem would have never appeared in the first place if the tagging button had been less available. I agree many other problems would be better addressed by having more people participate in the tagging system.
The new design seems to be influenced by the idea that spreading UI elements across greater distances (reducing their local density) makes the interface less cluttered. I think it’s a little bit the other way around, shorter distances with everything in one place make it easier to chunk and navigate, but overall the effect is small either way. And the design of spreading the UI elements this way is sufficiently unusual that it will be slightly confusing to many people.
I don’t really think that’s the primary thing going on. I think one of the key issues with the previous design was the irregularity of the layout. Everything under the header would wrap and basically be in one big jumble, with the number and length of the author names changing where the info on the number of comments is, and where the tags section starts.
It also didn’t communicate a good hierarchy on which information is important. Ultimately, all you need to start reading a post is the title and the content. The current design communicates the optionality of things like karma and tags better, whereas the previous design communicates that those pieces of information might need to be understood before you start reading.
The title is annoyingly large.
I like the table of contents on the left becoming visible only upon mouseover.
Why remove “x min read”? Even if it’s not gonna be super accurate between different people’s reading speeds, I still found it very helpful to decide at a glance how long a post is (e.g. whether to read it on the spot or bookmark it for later).
Showing the word count would also suffice.
Mostly because there is a prior against any UI element adding complexity.
In this case, with the new ToC progress bar which is now always visible, you can quickly glance the length of the post by checking the length of the progress bar relative to the viewport indicator. It’s an indirect inference, but I’ve gotten used to it pretty quickly. You can also still see the word count on hover-over.
I find a visual indicator much less useful and harder to reason about than a number, I feel pretty sad at lacking this. How hard would it be to have as an optional addition?
Maintaining many different design variants pretty inevitably leads to visual bugs and things being broken, so I am very hesitant to allow people to customize things at this level (almost every time we’ve done that in the past the custom UI broke in some way within a year or two, people wouldn’t complain to us, and in some cases, we would hear stories 1-2 years later that someone stopped using LW because “it started looking broken all the time”).
We are likely shipping an update to make the reading time easier to parse in the post-hover preview to compensate some for the lack of it not being available on the post page directly. I am kind of curious in which circumstances you would end up clicking on the post page without having gotten the hover-preview first (mobile is the obvious one, though we are just adding back the reading time on mobile, that was an oversight on my part).
Typically, opening a bunch of posts that look interesting and processing them later, or being linked to a post (which is pretty common in safety research, since often a post will be linked, shared on slack, cited in a paper, etc) and wanting to get a vibe for whether I can be bothered to read it. I think this is pretty common for me.
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Another thing I just noticed: on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
Oh, yeah, sure, I do think this kind of thing makes sense. I’ll look into what the most natural place for showing it on hover is (the date seems like a reasonable first guess).
I think this is really just a “any change takes some getting used to” type deal. My guess is it’s slightly easier to find for the first time than the previous design, but I am not sure. I’ll pay attention to whether new-ish users have trouble finding the triple-dot, and if so will make it more noticeable.
I don’t get a progress bar on mobile (unless I’m missing it somehow), and the word count on hover feature seemingly broke on mobile as well a while ago (I remember it working before).
Ah, I think showing something on mobile is actually a good idea. I forgot that the way we rearranged things that also went away. I will experiment with some ways of adding that information back in tomorrow.
I like this; I’ve found the meta-data of posts to be quite heavy and cluttered (a multi-line title, the author+reading-time+date+comments line, the tag line, a linkpost line and a “crossposted from the Aligned Forum” line is quite a lot).
I was going to comment that “I’d like the option to look at the table-of-contents/structure”, but I then tested and indeed it displays if you hover your mouse there. I like that.
When I open a new post, the top banner with the LessWrong link to the homepage, my username etc. show up. I’d prefer if that didn’t happen? It’s not like I want to look at the banner (which has no new info to me) when I click open a post, and hiding it would make the page less cluttered.
I’ve never considered that. I do think it’s important for the banner to be there when you get linked externally, so that you can orient to where you are, but I agree it’s reasonable to hide it when you do a navigation on-site. I’ll play around a bit with this. I like the idea.
Noting that I use the banner as breadcrumb navigation relatively often, clicking LessWrong to go back to the homepage or my username to get a menu and go to my drafts. The banner is useful to me as a place to reach those menus.
No idea how common that use pattern is.
Totally. The only thing that I think we would do is to start you scrolled down 64px on the post page (the height of the header), so that you would just scroll a tiny bit up and then see the header again (or scroll up anywhere and have it pop in the same way it does right now).
I am really missing the word counter. It’s something I look at quite a lot (less so on reading time estimates, as I got used to making the estimate myself based on the wordcount).
My overall review is, seems fine, some pros and some cons, mostly looks/feels the same to me. Some details;
I had also started feeling like the stuff between the title and the start of the post content was cluttered.
I think my biggest current annoyance is the TOC on the left sidebar. This has actually disappeared for me, and I don’t see it on hover-over, which I assume is maybe just a firefox bug or something. But even before this update, I didn’t like the TOC. Specifically, you guys had made it so that there was spacing between the sections that was supposed to be proportional to the length of each section. This never felt like it worked for me (I could speculate on why if you’re interested). I’d much prefer if the TOC was just a normal outline-type thing (which it was in a previous iteration).
I think I’ll also miss the word count. I use it quite frequently (usually after going onto the post page itself, so the preview card wouldn’t help much). Having the TOC progress bar thing never felt like it worked either. I agree with Neel that it’d be fine to have the word count in the date hover-over, if you want to have less stuff on the page.
The tags at the top right are now just bare words, which I think looks funny. Over the years you guys have often seemed to prefer really naked minimalist stuff. In this case I think the tags kinda look like they might be site-wide menus, or something. I think it’s better to have the tiny box drawn around each tag as a visual cue.
The author name is now in a sans-serif font, which looks pretty off to me in between the title and the text as serif fonts. It looks like when the browser failed to load the site font and falls back onto the default font, or something. (I do see that it matches the fact that usernames in the comments are sans serif, though.)
I initially disliked the karma section being so suppressed, but then I read one of your comments in this thread explaining your reasoning behind that, and now I agree it’s good.
I also use the comment count/link to jump to comments fairly often, and agree that having that in the lower left is fine.
I like most of the changes, but strongly dislike the large gap before the title. (I similarly dislike the large background in the top 50 of the year posts)
Well, the gap you actually want to measure is the gap between the title and the audio player (or at the very least the tags), since that’s the thing we need to make space for. You are clearly looking at LW on an extremely large screen. This is the more median experience:
There is still a bunch of space there, but for many posts the tags extend all the way above the post.
I understand that having the audio player above the title is the path of least resistance, since you can’t assume there is enough space on the right to put it in. But ideally things like this should be dynamic, and only take up vertical space if you can’t put it on the right, no? (but I’m not a frontend dev)
Alternatively, I would consider moving them vertically above the title a slight improvement. It is not great either, but at least the reason for having the gap is more obvious.
The above screenshots are done in a 1920x1080 monitor
Yeah, we could make things dynamic, it would just add complexity that we would need to check every time we make a change. It’s the kind of iterative improvement we might do over time, but it’s not something that should block the roll-out of a new design (and it’s often lower priority than other things, though post-pages in-particular are very important and so get a lot more attention than other pages).
The new design means that I now move my mouse cursor first to the top right, and then to the bottom left, on every single new post. This UI design is bad ergonomics and feels actively hostile to users.
I’ve been playing around with some ways to move the comment icon to the top right corner, ideally somehow removing the audio-player icon (which is much less important, but adds a lot of visual noise in a way that overwhelms the top right corner if you also add the comment icon). We’ll see whether I can get it to work.
It takes more vertical space than it used to and I don’t like that. (Also, the meatball menu is way off in the corner, which is annoying if I want to e.g. bookmark a post, though I don’t use it very often so it’s not a major inconvenience.) I think I like the new font, though!
Another minor annoyance I’ve since noticed, at this small scale it’s hard to to distinguish posts I’ve upvoted from posts I haven’t voted on. Maybe it’d help if the upvote indicator were made a darker shade of green or something?
Yeah, that’s on my to-do list. I also think the current voting indicator isn’t clear enough at the shrunken size.
On desktop the title font is jarringly huge. I already know the title from the front page, no need to scream it at me.
If you get linked externally (which is most of LW’s traffic), you don’t know the title (and also generally are less oriented on the page, so it helps to have a very clear information hierarchy).
I do also agree the font is very large. I made an intentionally bold choice here for a strong stylistic effect. I do think it’s pretty intense and it might be the wrong choice, but I currently like it aesthetically a bunch.
The new UI is great, and I agree with the thinking behind de-emphasizing karma votes at the top. It could sometimes create inherent bias and assumptions (no matter whether the karma is high or low) even before reading a post, whereas it would make more sense at the end of the post.
The karma buttons are too small for actions that in my experience, are done a lot more than clicking to listen to the post. It’s pretty easy to misclick.
Additionally, it’s unclear what the tags are, as they’re no longer right beside the post to indicate their relevance.
The big vote buttons are at the bottom of the post, where I would prefer more of the voting to happen (I am mildly happy to discourage voting at the top of the post before you read it, though I am not confident).
I ~always want to see the outline when I first open a post and when I’m reading/skimming through it. I wish the outline appeared when-not-hover-over-ing for me.
I like the decluttering. I think the title should be smaller and have less white space above it. Also think that it would be better if the ToC was maybe just faded a lot until mouseover, the sudden appearance/disappearance feels too sudden.
I think making things faint enough so that the relatively small margin between main body text and the ToC wouldn’t become bothersome during reading isn’t really feasible. In-general, because people’s screen-contrast and color calibration differs quite a lot, you don’t have that much wiggle room at the lower level of opacity without accidentally shipping completely different experiences to different users.
I think it’s plausible we want to adjust the whitespace below the title, but I think you really need this much space above the title to not have it look cluttered together with the tags on smaller screens. On larger screens there is enough distance between the title and top right corner, but things end up much harder to parse when the tags extend into the space right above the title, and that margin isn’t big enough.
I think this applies to titles too
I think the title is more important for parsing the content of an essay. Like, if a friend sends you a link, it’s important to pay a bunch of attention to the title. It’s less important that you spend attention to the karma.