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Comment by peebeebee | Hacker News Reader

As a webdesigner myself I kind of disagree. Simple content per screen just works better for the example they gave. It’s easier to visually parse. Their condensed version has a lot of multi column layouts which I really dislike.

High content density works for desktop applications, but not for what’s basically a brochure website.

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What's cool about the article's take, though, is that it's based on an actual usability study and not just something someone said.

Where's the peer review?

Let's not set up a double standard here. It's not like non-evidence-based opinions are subject to peer review.

I'm just applying the same standard here, a non peer reviewed study has the same value as the opinion of a web designer.

A study needs peer review, but some web designer's opinion is just to be accepted as gospel?

When you use appeal to credibility "this is a real study and not just an opinion", yes, you need a peer review. Especially with how poor the quality of much unreviewed research is. Nobody suggested taking the opinion as gospel.

"Appeal to credibility"? Are we just making up fallacies based on a formula now?

Yes, given two alternatives, one should prefer the one that is more credible in light of the available information. That certainly doesn't mean that the more credible of the two is incontrovertible, but it does take more than armchair skepticism to controvert it.

Skepticism is about paying attention to all of the evidence that has been presented. Coming up with cute phrases to justify offhandedly dismissing information that you don't like falls more into the realm of pseudoskepticism.

Every string of words isn't just naming a fallacy. Sometimes words just make sentences. The person was appealing to the credibility associated with a "real study", so that's what I said.

I'm gonna assume you mean appeal to authority. As someone who has had a leg inside academia, it is shocking how frequently peer review lets absolutely methodologically horrifying studies through the cracks. Peer review is little more than a rubber stamp that enables others to be less skeptical of the contents.

The true stamp of proof in science was always intended to be replicability, but that is extremely rare to find.

Nope, both are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Agreed. It's hard to believe that marketing pages, after decades of evolution and testing, haven't landed on what users actually want, rather than what they say they want.

Scrolling is such a natural behavior for internet natives. Being able to leverage a large screen to visually compare things has its place, but the article uses a horrible example:

> Our condensed product page prototype took the same information from the original dispersed page and arranged it in a 2x2 grid that allowed users to compare multiple services simultaneously, without having to remember the details of each service.

What's to compare? They're disparate services.

I do like the example of the product specifications. But that was more of an objective usability issue: requiring more clicks for more information.

> Scrolling is such a natural behavior for internet natives.

My jaw dropped at the participant who apparently saw the hero section of one of the pages, and thought that was the whole site. I get that scroll bars are invisible these days so you can't immediately see the page height, but not even trying to scroll anyway is wild to me.

But tons of users are not "internet natives".

It’s not at all uncommon.

Scrollbars can show up at weird places and not do anything at all due to UI issues, and they’re not that visible anyway in proportion to the page contents, even if we are to assume Windows 95 style scroll bars. Therefore the only indication of whether a piece of content is scrollable is its layout, and a hero taking up the entire viewport height is next to impossible to understand.

This is the reason many such pages have a “Learn more” page whose only function is to scroll the page down by one viewport height, or less commonly a pulsating arrow at the bottom that tells the user the content is scrollable.

I totally understand the point about the scroll bars, I meant to say that I habitually scroll pages, without even thinking. There's no analysis, no attention to the (hard to see) scroll bar, the intuition is always to scroll. Even when it's very clear that I'm intended to be at the bottom (e.g. I can see a conventional footer layout) it's just a reflex.

But yes, I agree with you it's undoubtedly common (enough). I was just pointing out the difference with "internet natives".

Another web designer here: I agree. Notice how the screenshots are "zoomed out" which makes the multi column look rich and more visually appealing. While I'm all for using the horizontal space available to you, everything we're taught about "call to action" leads to single element design.

Yes. I kind of agree with the headline of the article in reality, but their example isn't good.

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