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Comment by okasaki | Hacker News Reader

I'm stuggling to put into words how much I dislike designs like this - superheavy javascript sites that work like ass on my netbook, full of empty space and icons instead of text (so I have to hover over the icons to find out what they do - where's the sense in this??) and customized "UI" functionality that make me forever unsure what my clicks will produce.

Wikipedia has a plain but very pleasant interface and this would totally ruin it for me.

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I'm guessing that this is just portfolio fodder for the designer. For better or worse, recruiters (and hell, even managers) are looking for UX designers that have the capacity to design trendy looking stuff and have a grasp of what's somewhat relevant. Hence, redesigning a hugely-popular site like Wikipedia to look like a recently-redesigned mobile first news site.

Just wanted to point that out before people rail on this redesign too much. There are a lot of design anti-patterns in this redesign, but, again, it's the result of having to market yourself to people who really don't know what design is.

As a developer with a blind spot for design anti-patterns, can you elaborate on those?

I'm not a designer and I don't know anything about anti-patterns, but here's what grinds my gears about it:

-The layout switches between using icons and text as buttons/menu items on the same page

-The homepage looks like aol/yahoo's landing page - too busy and no sense of direction

-theres like 3 different bar selection menus on the front page, all in different places that do dramatically different things. I don't have any kind of visual cues into what the bar menu on the top or right do.

-gigantic images and padding reduce information density

As an employer, high on my list would be appropriateness and this fails miserably.

Could not agree more

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