In response to lifelonglearner’s comment I did some experimenting with making the page a bit bolder. Curious what people think of this screenshot where “unread” posts are bold, and “read” posts are “regular” (as opposed to the current world, where “unread” posts “regular”, and read posts are light-gray).
I’d be interested in trying it out. At a glance, it feels too much to me like it’s trying to get me to read Everything, when I can tell from the titles and snippets that some posts aren’t for me. If anything the posts I’ve already read are often ones I want emphasized more? (Because I’m curious to see if there are new comments on things I’ve already read, or I may otherwise want to revisit the post to link others to it, or finish reading it, etc.)
The bold font does look aesthetically fine and breaks things up in an interesting way, so I like the idea of maybe using it for more stuff?
I think I prefer the status quo design, but not very strongly. Between the two designs pictured here, I at first preferred the one where the authors weren’t bolded, but now I think I prefer the one where the whole line is bolded, since “[insert author whose posts I enjoy] has posted something” is as newsworthy as “there’s a post called [title I find enticing]”.
Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I tend to underestimate how much I can get used to things, so I might end up just as happy with whichever design is chosen.
Fwiw, for reasons I can’t explain I vastly prefer just the title bolded to the entire line bolded, and significantly prefer the status quo to title bolded.
I initially wanted “bold everywhere” because it helped my brain reliably parse things as “this is a bold line” instead of “this is a line with some bold parts but you have to hunt for them”. But, after experimenting a bit I started to feeling having bold elements semi-randomly distributed across the lines made it a lot busier.
The LW team has been trying this out the “bolded unread posts” a few days as an admin-only setting. I think pretty much everyone isn’t liking it.
But I personally am liking the fact that most posts aren’t grey, and I’m finding myself wondering whether it’s even that important to highlight unread posts. Obviously there’s some value to it, but:
a) a post being read isn’t actually that much evidence about whether I want to read it again – I find myself clicking on old posts about as often as new posts. (This might be something you could concretely look into with analytics)
b if I don’t want to read a post, marking it as read is sort of annoying
c) I still really dislike having most of my posts be grey
d) it’s really hard to make an “unread” variant that doesn’t scream out for disproportionate attention.
(I suppose there’s also an option for this to be a user-configurable setting, since most users don’t read so many posts that they all show up grey, and the few who do could maybe just manually turn it off)
In response to lifelonglearner’s comment I did some experimenting with making the page a bit bolder. Curious what people think of this screenshot where “unread” posts are bold, and “read” posts are “regular” (as opposed to the current world, where “unread” posts “regular”, and read posts are light-gray).
I’d be interested in trying it out. At a glance, it feels too much to me like it’s trying to get me to read Everything, when I can tell from the titles and snippets that some posts aren’t for me. If anything the posts I’ve already read are often ones I want emphasized more? (Because I’m curious to see if there are new comments on things I’ve already read, or I may otherwise want to revisit the post to link others to it, or finish reading it, etc.)
The bold font does look aesthetically fine and breaks things up in an interesting way, so I like the idea of maybe using it for more stuff?
Alternate version where only the title and karma are bolded:
I think I prefer the status quo design, but not very strongly. Between the two designs pictured here, I at first preferred the one where the authors weren’t bolded, but now I think I prefer the one where the whole line is bolded, since “[insert author whose posts I enjoy] has posted something” is as newsworthy as “there’s a post called [title I find enticing]”.
Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I tend to underestimate how much I can get used to things, so I might end up just as happy with whichever design is chosen.
Fwiw, for reasons I can’t explain I vastly prefer just the title bolded to the entire line bolded, and significantly prefer the status quo to title bolded.
I think I prefer bolding full lines b/c it makes it easier to see who authored what?
I initially wanted “bold everywhere” because it helped my brain reliably parse things as “this is a bold line” instead of “this is a line with some bold parts but you have to hunt for them”. But, after experimenting a bit I started to feeling having bold elements semi-randomly distributed across the lines made it a lot busier.
The LW team has been trying this out the “bolded unread posts” a few days as an admin-only setting. I think pretty much everyone isn’t liking it.
But I personally am liking the fact that most posts aren’t grey, and I’m finding myself wondering whether it’s even that important to highlight unread posts. Obviously there’s some value to it, but:
a) a post being read isn’t actually that much evidence about whether I want to read it again – I find myself clicking on old posts about as often as new posts. (This might be something you could concretely look into with analytics)
b if I don’t want to read a post, marking it as read is sort of annoying
c) I still really dislike having most of my posts be grey
d) it’s really hard to make an “unread” variant that doesn’t scream out for disproportionate attention.
(I suppose there’s also an option for this to be a user-configurable setting, since most users don’t read so many posts that they all show up grey, and the few who do could maybe just manually turn it off)