Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 86 posts.

Design & UX
67

Design Principles for Reducing Cognitive Load

Every time you visit a website, a process of learning is initiated in the brain. Whether it’s the navigation, layout, or that auto-rotating image slider on the homepage, your brain has to learn how to use the site while keeping track of the reason you came there in the first place. The mental effort required during…

77

We Have Always Been at War with UI

A familiar story: company makes product, product becomes wildly popular, company royally fucks product up. The most recent example of this is TimelineGate, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind for a while. Thus I present to you a list of complaints about personally-inconvenient UI changes, carefully disguised as a…