Monday, July 18, 2011

Bad Design

I love Hacker News, it's got that rough yet highly technical feel that Slashdot had maybe a decade ago. It's very startup oriented, which is all about the new tech and the valley.

Yet if you load their page, and let it sit for a few minutes - your session times out, and when you go to click the "Next" link at the bottom of the page, half the time you'll get an "Unknown/expired link" error.

Yes, content changes, and a proper index will eventually need to time out. But, Hacker News - there is a very simple solution to this.

Instead of giving a useless, annoying, irritating error - why dont you just refresh to your main index page?

Bingo - content refreshed, no stupid error messages, and a slightly less broken user experience.

Research shows I'm not the only person to have noticed this... Maybe I should script up a little JS add-on to do do this for me in Chrome.

Actually....To Be Continued!