Laws of UX - <AUTHOR> https://lawsofux.com/ <comment> yoz-y After all the criticism here I took a shot of paraphrasing the website in a page length post: [https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux- digested/](https://yozy.net/2018/01/10-laws-of-ux-digested/)

A kind of an opinionated tl;dr

<comment><USER2> I agree with all your interpretations except for #4, I think it's the opposite, if something is ambiguous then you need to add detail to clarify it, and you can present a lot of information at once as long as the representation is consistent.

Having lots of detail is not equivalent to being complex.

<comment><USER3> I would agree. I think the real rule #4 is "Take greater care when presenting detailed or complex information. The presentation will often speak louder than the information."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Make the most important thing stand out"

I'd be careful with this one and be sure you understand what you are doing on a case-by-case basis. I have noticed a thing which I'm not sure there's a name for, but I call it Emphasis Blindness.

Similar to Banner Blindness, I think users today are often trained by habit to ignore things that stand out as some kind of obvious promotional item.

For example, you have 5 items in your navigation: Process Company News Blog Shop, and Shop is the most important, right? So you put it in some kind of special placement, and give it a button-like appearance with a special color and an outline. That doesn't necessarily make it easier to see! In some cases your users might just be looking through the "normal" navigation and not see "Shop". They will skip right over your large colorful button because it looks like a promotion, which they are trained to ignore.

Something to consider anyway.

<comment> amw-zero That doesn't really apply to enterprise software. There are no ads there.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't mean the training doesn't still kick in. I've missed things in email because someone has written the most important information in bold magenta on a line apart and my brain just scrolls right past it.

<comment><USER6> I actually get annoyed enough by mixed bold and normal text that I can barely look at an email written with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone else enjoy it for what it was? I get the criticisms, you want the web to be homogenised and free from any form of expression that doesn't present every piece of information in it's most human-machine digestible form, I get it. But it was pretty simple to use and the flair was minimal. I don't understand the pitchforks. There's a few minor annoyances like the back button not working as expected, but they are very minor for a site so small.

<comment><USER8> > I get the criticisms, you want the web to be homogenised and free from any > form of expression that doesn't present every piece of information in it's > most human-machine digestible form, I get it.

You don't get it, you just minimized and dismissed everyone's objections to this site.

As a power point presentation, this site is great. As a line item on your resume, sure.

As a resource that someone can use and reference, it's awful.

<comment><USER9> Right, and it's clearly not a reference website, considering it's a random selection of a few UX guidelines.

<comment><USER10> It looks like an individual's side project to learn a few tools and make something sort of fun and informational. Maybe it's not the immediate perfect solution of all things but so what.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I thought it was kind of cool. I work in UX, so some aspects bother me - but it probably serves it's purpose well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a law of UX related to making a user scroll thousands of pixels to read 10 sentences?

<comment><USER12> I agree. And the laws are stated in complex sentences, so I really could use some more explanation. To learn more I have to click, go to another page, wait for a slow animation of the poster design and only then I could one paragraph explaining it further. And when I go back to the home page, it takes up to the top at the first law and I have to scroll it all over again to the point I was before.

Awful experience.

It looks like the author is a talented graphic designer that decided to compile the laws of UX without reading them (actually, I wouldn't know, as there was too much friction for me to read them all)

<comment> yoz-y At first I did not like that the 3rd law spoke about 'sites' when it could be applied to applications as well (or any other usable thing). Then I realized that these are most probably citations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a website all about UX, the site is almost impossible to use (at least on mobile), both from an intuitiveness perspective and from a technical one.

I am entirely unsure what I'm supposed to click on, if what I'm seeing is an animation or a loading progress bar, the back button gave me a blank, black page, and everything on the site would be better if it were simply static html without all this JavaScript garbage that serves exactly zero functional purpose.

<comment><USER14> I clicked on one of the book covers and ended up with an abstract full screen animation that ran for five seconds before I figured out it was a full screen page header.

I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the people that work with it employed. A simple, straight forward implementation with a little color and layout to make it stand out would have been much easier to navigate and digest, but making check boxes not look like check boxes, drawing cryptic metaphorical icons, random show-off CSS animations that serve no purpose etc. creates work opportunities.

I'm open to the idea that I belong to some sort of cynical minority, but I know for sure that it often happens to the detriment of things like ergonomics and usability. When I see a site like this I can't help but think that they never considered the experience they're supposedly designing.

<comment><USER15> >I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the people that work with it employed.

I work with web designers and can corroborate that.

Most of the time, their product is sold, negotiated and approved before anyone has actually used it. An unusable mess can be a "successful" project, while a usable product can be completely kiboshed and not even paid for or used. This pushes the emphasis towards beauty instead of functionality, often to the latter's extreme detriment.

This gets worse when the stakeholder has some pet attribute they believe is important, especially "cleanliness." These "clean" designs mindlessly strip away anything that can physically be stripped away, without regard to its importance. As long as the design _still kind of reminds_ the client of their company, they don't see it as a problem.

<comment><USER16> It doesn't help that the designers often do not code and model the experiences in animation software.

I am currently working on a redesign and just saw the agency's suggestions for animation. Seem to be highly influenced by iOS apps' transitions and motion. But this is a website, for browsers, to be displayed on a variety of screen sizes, on a variety of browser versions.

And the users of my website use mostly other websites so if I create something that behaves very differently, the training they have will be wasted and the experience — unintuitive.

So the agency will present this to high management, in an ideal layout, designed in animation software, moving perfectly smoothly and solving for only one case without a clue on how to approach corner cases. If management finds it sexy, we'll be stuck with development and maintenance of ultra complicated code. And the pleasure of discovering and resolving all corner cases ourselves, on a deadline, with limited budget.

<comment><USER13> > It doesn't help that the designers often do not code and model the > experiences in animation software.

I don't think even that is a good enough reason. They simply don't approach the problem the way someone using their app would. It's the developers' problem to turn a difficult design into code, but the real problem is that even when that is done perfectly, the UX _still_ sucks.

Every time we redesigned a major UX component of the dashboard of our (desktop) app, we would grab a random secretary, HR person, accountant, or anyone else we could find and borrow an hour of their time and just watch them try to use it _without any prior preconceptions that come as a result of designing /coding the interface yourself_.

It's been 10 years since we used that trick and I've moved on from that company, but I still think it's the best approach I've ever come across short of outsourcing some sort of panel testing.

<comment><USER17> User testing is a must have for digital design, otherwise the designers you work with are just graphic designers who pretend to know the tenets of UX through skimming some medium articles occasionally and do a great disservice to us folks who come from academia with degrees in HCI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX. There are many positive things that could be said, but in the interest of brevity, I'll mention just two.

Customizability. Users could set up their own hot keys, and even their own tool bars.

Discoverability. Every UI widget (knob) had a tooltip, which explained its function. When a menu item was being browsed, there was a help line on the bottom that explained its function. Items that could be clicked were either visually distinct (such as buttons), or highlighted when hovering over them.

<comment><USER19> > The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX __for power users __.

Regular users didn't set up their own hotkeys or their toolbars. And they definitely didn't read the help or tool tips.

The best UX for regular users, not interested in computers, is somewhere between websites and mobile apps.

<comment><USER20> Regular users are not interested in computers. They're interested in getting shit done, and getting on with their lives.

Which is precisely what modern UX makes _harder_. You see, regular users aren't "neanderthal users". They have a brain and some amount of focus, and if they have to use an application/website more than few times, they'll figure out and appreciate any feature that lets them do their work more efficiently. Unfortunately, modern UX trends are all about _removing_ productivity, turning tools into toys.

<comment><USER21> This is just giving UX a bad name.

There cannot exist the best UX for regular users. There are things that are used once or very rarely and have to be designed to rely on people's prior experience with other things, like most websites. And there are other things that are used often and have to be designed to be learned. Every case is different and not simple.

As for trends, maybe you are thinking about UI trends. People do like to follow those and confuse UIs with UX and make things harder for everyone. But you can't really say there are UX trends.

<comment><USER18> > This is just giving UX a bad name.

It's a question if UX already isn't an orwellian term for "be cheap on UI" or "target lowest common denominator of users". I don't know, but you should ask that question yourself.

If you're more interested in name than substance, it might be an indicator.

> There cannot exist the best UX for regular users.

Categorical claims of non-existence require extraordinary amount of evidence.

> Every case is different and not simple.

That might be the thing. UIs (and usability) in the 90s focused on consistency. But then interactive websites ("applications") became a thing and the consistency (for example in the looks) was thrown out the window.

So everybody has to target the lowest common denominator (aka "regular users") now, because of the mess that this artistic explosion created. (There are other factors, too, such as that touch screens by definition lead to worse UIs.)

I don't entirely lament the mess (the artistic explosion is nice). But please, don't claim that we made progress in usability.

> But you can't really say there are UX trends.

I would say UX itself is a trend. As someone already noted, it had a name before - ergonomics. It's really similar to "data scientist", which is largely a modern trend of how to call a statistician.

<comment><USER21> I don't know how to explain this better, but there is no lowest common denominator among users. Regular users use different things differently, some things they use like tools, often, other things once and never again. This usage is what influences design decisions, not the regularity of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ironically the site itself breaks the 3rd listed law, Jakob's law that states "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." because it breaks the back button. When navigating to a law and then hitting back the site sends you to the top of the list again. -

<comment><USER23> My vote for law 11 is "don't use JavaScript unless it's absolutely necessary". That way the browser actually behaves the way you expect.

<comment><USER24> Seems a broad law considering

* Expectation is subjective and this forum are the minority

* History-jacking done badly is not a reason to throw out a technology

Random JavaScript hate is so last year

<comment><USER25> > Random JavaScript hate is so last year

It may well be, and with good reason. However, I still encounter people who think that JavaScript is only used for things like onMouseOver and find it difficult to accept that actually, their favourite app or site is entirely powered by JavaScript.

<comment><USER24> That sounds like the vast majority of users expect more functionality from browsers than can be achieved without javascript. Do you think they would be willing to part with that functionality to achieve engineering perfection?

<comment><USER25> > Do you think they would be willing to part with that functionality to > achieve engineering perfection?

I think that the question would be entirely lost on most users. Perhaps there needs to be a push to educate on the benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a portfolio piece, it's great. I don't really care that it's not the most usable thing in the world - the underlying concept is sound, it's easy to see a lot of effort went into the design and execution, and the site looks great! Buuuut that's about all it's good for in it's current form.

Unfortunately, the way something looks is but a tiny, tiny factor in the scope of the overall UX. This totally falls apart as a reference piece that I can bookmark and go back to from time to time. I think this is also compounded by the fact that the content of the site is centered around preaching good UX - but doesn't adhere to it's own advice. I can forgive lapses in UX thinking on software engineering blogs or the latest and greatest crypto forum...but if your site about UX has bad UX, you're in for a bad time - especially on HN.

</comment><comment><USER27> Welcome to this website about UX that took all of 2 seconds to annoy the shit out of me by giving me the impression that I am in some sort of foreground mode that I possibly might want to get out of to access the site...

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't have the references right in front of me but I'm pretty sure the 7 +/\- 2 in Law six is now thought to be 5 +/\- 2.

Wiki puts it at 4 +/\- 1:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short- term_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory)

<comment><USER29> Plus the associated illustration (on Laws of UX) seems to agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The reaction on Hacker News compared to the reaction on Designer News is great.

I think the problem people are struggling with is that it's a site created mostly for fun and delight, but the message is about "UX", which people generally think of as a way to maximize efficiency.

Products don't always need to be relentlessly efficient to be considered useful or "good". Some products are created for you to just enjoy.

<comment><USER31> [0] [https://www.designernews.co/stories/90954-laws-of- ux](https://www.designernews.co/stories/90954-laws-of-ux)

Super positive. We love it.

Blows my mind. But that's the point - it's really like two very, very different ways of thinking about, approaching/creating and evaluating projects (in this case, a web site.) On one side, they have "an eye for design" that really appreciates this novel UI design, but on this other side, we have that eye for efficiency and... ahem... user experience. (Rather than how a designer might experience something.)

<comment><USER21> Oh, thanks for the link, this gives it a lot more context. A website made just to show his designer friends who are also pressured by the market to not value UX. Makes sense they romanticize UX and don't actually bother with it themselves.

<comment><USER30> That's not really the point we were making and I'm not sure you have a correct understanding of UX, as you're conflating UX and visual design.

There's no pressure in the market to not value UX. Everyone wants and needs that. If anything there are pressures to only value efficiency rather than delight. Sometimes "fun" isn't efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Jacob's Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that > users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they > already know.

This should come with the footnote "unless you're Facebook". I wonder if they're fully aware of the power they wield in defining what normal/expected UX looks like to a so many people? (e.g. popularizing the mobile three lines 'hamburger' menu, then later moving away from it themselves)

<comment><USER33> Most people aren't working on such a site. I think such a footnote would be dangerous since too many people would then assume that they are, in fact, Facebook.

I mean, even site of huge companies are not necessarily the Facebook of anything, since that's just not the use case. I would, for example, argue that this law applies perfectly and without any qualifications to Apple's website which might see a lot of traffic, but it's not exactly a site users spend most of their times on. (I would also argue that the website people actually do spend most time on exists in a certain context where the outside world will have some influence on how and how efficiently it is perceived and used. Obviously the website people do spend the most time on has a role in forming that context, but so does the web as a whole and every single site.)

Oh, and I do think Facebook is very aware of that fact, but you still have to see that they are always wrestling with the status quo, i.e. for them the law takes the form of "Users spend most of their time on other sites _or on the old variant of your site_. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know _or your site as it was_."

It's not exactly easy for them, even if they get to be expectation-defining and their power is not absolute. The stakes are high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34>
        Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

I actually needed to research this claim for my dissertation, and found that some researchers believe it is more complex than as presented by Miller. The number can fluctuate depending on what is being stored, the individual, and a number of other factors. A worthwhile starting point is the Wikipedia Page [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh the irony, this site has terrible UX.

<comment><USER36>
        <ul>
          {% for law in laws %}
          <li><strong>{{ law.name }}</strong>  - {{ law.summary }}
           <a href="{{ law.wikipedia_url }}">{{ law.name }} on Wikipedia</a>
          </li>
          {% endfor %}
        </ul>

<comment><USER37> Jinja2 or Django template language?

<comment><USER22> I think it's valid in both!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Tesler's law really rings true in non-UX environments too. I have worked with several people insisting that you can somehow remove complexity by wrapping it in more levels of abstraction, which is utterly infuriating. Sometimes you really just have to accept that certain things are complex, and deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there are place where you can simply download pages already "perfected" in its UX and you can simply add your own custom business logic to it?

Something in this direction would be Bootstrap's templates:

[https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/)

I dunno about you, but I'd rather not have to think about how to make project sites look like every time, but at the same time not necessarily use the same purchased template (because said template may not actually have a good UX).

The fact that there are no standards here is part of the problem, IMO. Novelty drives views and therefore revenue so some sites are incentivized to be overly complex, imo.

<comment><USER40> UX can't be a plug-and-play solution, because it depends on your business and the user's goals.

UX is figuring out what should be a main menu element and what shouldn't. Home and princing? Definitively. ToS and privacy policy? Not so much.

UX is making some elements stand out as they are. What's the best way to show links to users? Spoiler alert: blue color and underline. But then what happens when your brand color is blue and the design has a blue background? Then links won't stand out.

You could say that the UX plug-and-play solution is the way browsers handle the default CSS, add a few more styles and you got sites like CraigsList and Pinboard. And brutalism web design was born.

But that's the visual part about UX, you have to figure out what your users are feeling, and for most starting sites, feeling good is the selling point, so you have to understand their psyche and design towards it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Here's my suggested addition, law 00, that this website really needs to follow: Please don't make your websites into huge Vogue ads on desktop. I have a 27" monitor, I can fit more than 4 lines of text on my screen.

</comment><comment><USER42> The animation and no text displayed when a law is selected makes me think I'm waiting for loading to complete. It takes me couple of seconds to realize I need to scroll down to see the text.

</comment><comment><USER43> What font is this using? That weird mark on all the "st" pairs is _irritating_!

Maybe we need a number 11, "don't use weird fonts"

</comment><comment><USER44> Miller's law is outdated, there are newer studies that say working memory is around 4, very rarely 6. You can check your working memory with this little test mentioned in this tweet:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/UXColumbo/status/5978387232633651...](https://mobile.twitter.com/UXColumbo/status/597838723263365120)

</comment><comment><USER45> The "next" button is extremely difficult to find. I wonder if this site was user-tested.

Nice, huge, Fitts' Law-optimized button though.

</comment><comment><USER46> I call bullshit on all of these, with the possible exception of Fitt's Law and Tesler's Law.

It seems that a lot of things these days are being extremely simplified beyond their point of usefulness and that things are always too small and too cumbersome to click, and require extra clicks because "wow such empty-ness and whitespace-ness".

</comment><comment><USER47> I happen to think this is freaking awesome

</comment><comment><USER48> I find the layout of poster downloads on the detail pages of the individual laws, with the text of the law and lawofux.com tag on the right side, unfortunate. The layout of the posters on the top-level page are 100x more evocative and elegant. They are the posters I want.

</comment><comment><USER49> Really surprised that Gestalt Laws are not listed. (Law of Proximity is one of them).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology)

</comment><comment><USER50> It would be better if, instead of a useless albeit pretty icon, there was a brief description of what the law is about.

Fitts's Law tells me nothing about what it is other than its a UX "law" coined by someone called Fitts.

<comment><USER21> Here's a good article about this law, with many examples: [http://asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html](http://asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html)

<comment><USER50> Wasn't really about the law itself. The same applies to all laws listed.

I want to know which ones are most relevant to me. I'd like to see a summary for each one so I can make that decision before loading another page. Otherwise, I needlessly have to click on them, make a decision and click back if not.

This is similar to how a blog typically shows an excerpt for each post on the blog index. See Jakob's law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> One HCI book I read had a point that relates to Tesler's law: If your change requires users to make more clicks to perform the same task or action, it is probably a bad change.

</comment><comment><USER52> Not a fan of the website UI. Eg. For me, having to have a big down arrow telling the user further content is down, is a UI fail.

</comment><comment><USER53> The site looks nice, but I had to do way to much clicking to see the information. I gave up after the thrid law.

</comment><comment><USER54> Wish there were actual examples of each one instead of just an explanation. UI is cool but UX is poor.

</comment><comment><USER55> A new "Law of UX" should be coined: "Visual design is not UX."

</comment><comment><USER56> I know it's Laws of UX, but I first read the domain name as Law of Sux.

</comment><comment><USER57> Very cool, but no law about not using dark grey fonts on black..?

</comment><comment><USER58> i loved the fact that a site about UX doesn't allow me to open the links in new tabs... sooo annoying! damn it!

</comment><comment><USER59> Complaints about the web site itself aside, I'd like to encourage designers to exercise more restraint when applying some of these laws. Most poignant for me is the misapplication and zealous over-application of Hick's Law. If you review the detailed link provided by the site [1] you will see some commentary about when not to use Hick's law.

Personally, I would significantly expand where Hick's law should not be applied. Examine the example provided that compares two remote controls: one with a common suite of buttons, and another with a dramatically reduced set of buttons. The site seems to suggest that at the very least the stripped remote yields ratings of "better user experience" from users. I would argue that such _ratings_ alone should not drive UX decision-making.

In my life, I have seen the trend of simplifying user interfaces chip away at functionality in virtually every interaction I have with technology, and I don't feel better for it. I really miss the opportunity to more finely control devices and applications according to my needs and wants. The most recent technological epoch—focused so much on mobile devices as it is—has been among the most pronounced with its stripping of functionality (ostensibly to make things easier to use on tiny displays).

I often feel that this law is misapplied, perhaps subconsciously as an excuse to not build more comprehensive functionality. Why build a hard button that can turn on and off Closed Captioning when you can just put that in a menu, or better yet, not implement Closed Captioning at all?

(To be clear: it can be perfectly fine to hide infrequently-used features in special menus. I use about:config in Firefox routinely. What bothers me most is that, for example, the browser on my phone doesn't have a tenth the options of Firefox and certainly doesn't have anything like about:config. The argument this is because it's a small screen device seems hollow to me; the real reason almost always rings of laziness and contempt for customization by users. Sometimes it will be spun as a means to reduce testing time—laziness by another name—as if mobile software has had any track record of being tested more thoroughly versus old desktop software.)

Designers, hear my plea: Let's start pushing back on Hick's Law. Yes, in cases of needing a fast decision, a stripped user interface is agreeable. But in many cases, we're not acutely rushed while using our devices. Generally, I want more functionality from technology, not less. Stop using a UX law as cover for laziness and reduced feature sets.

[1] [https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick- decis...](https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick-decision- making-3dcc1b1a0632)

<comment><USER60> >doesn't have anything like about:config

I use about:config frequently on my phone - is a pain to use on a phone however. Here's an idea. Use software on the phone but allows users (who wish to) to do deep configuration of phone software on their desktop computer.

I have the opposite complaint about most phone apps - they expose complexity on screens where it's not appropriate. Good software on any platform should "make common things easy and hard things possible".

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> what a load...

Conservation, momentum, trying to force people to use physics concepts for UX, for crying out loud, is anybody taking this seriously?

<comment><USER62> Yeah seriously. Are people really that insecure with their job titles that they need to invent bullshit to make UX seem more scientific?

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Gkya's law of usefulness of a web page:

The usefulness of a web page is a function of the multiplication of the number of laws it cites w/o any context whatsoever and the ratio of the lines of text such page contains in a screenful over how many it could've contained.

> The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of > the target.

Wat?

> The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and > complexity of choices.

Certainly. But this is as relevant as general relativity to designing UX: the context is the key. What are you making, for what purpose, when, for whom? In this form in which it's put forth here, this can mean about anything.

> Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer > your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

This is SOOO WRONG. I probably don't spend time on those sites because I'm in love with their UI, most of the time I'm fighting it with uBlock and patience. Many people are in prisons, that doesn't mean they like it.

> People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the > simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the > least cognitive effort of us.

Again, this means nothing. It's like, "stones are hard". Alright then, what am I supposed to do? Sand them? Hit my head on them? Throw them at passers-by?

> Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped > together.

Alright...

> The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working > memory.

Yeah...

> Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Oh, thanks...

> Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a > series.

This is kind of immediately useful, but it's also neat that this rule is ignored in making this fancy bulleted list.

> Tesler's Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states > that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be > reduced.

Agree.

> The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that > when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the > rest is most likely to be remembered.

Certainly true.

This web page is a good demonstration of bad UX: there certainly are some stuff there that _could_ be useful, but no indication of how that can be possible is made, no explanation of what is before the eyes of the reader is there, the only means of interpretation provided to the reader is intuition, illegiblity is swiftly achieved by using black font on a nearly-black background, the viewport is used with absolutely no care to efficiency, and there is a menu that requires JavaScript to operate. This is like a parody of a page on UX laws.

Put information on your web pages, people.

<comment><USER64> > The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of > the target.

If you need to move the cursor far and to a small target, it will take a long time to hone in on it.

The shorter you have to move it, and the larger the target - the easier it is to click.

For example the menu on macOS is always at the top of the screen, making its target HUGE and is therefore basically O(1) to hit.

<comment><USER65> What (I believe) gkya was trying to point out is that "the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" is a rather pointless statement. Of course it's _a_ function of the distance to and size of a target; but Fitts' law consists not in this observation (which was nothing new to Fitts himself, and most likely to the entire human race ever since the first Paleolithic man tried to throw a stone at something), but in the actual function, ID = log(2D/W).

The cargo-cult reading of Fitts' work which is so prevalent nowadays probably accounts for many of the instances of cargo-cult UX design that are so popular today.

<comment><USER63> I don't really know Fitts' work, but I do understand that what that sentence means is obviously "smaller things are harder to click or tap". But that is very obvious and thus meaningless without indicating what that implies: e.g. "make bigger buttons".

<comment><USER65> OK, first, that sentence _does not_ mean "smaller things are harder to click or tap". That sentence would still hold true if smaller things were _easier_ to click or tap. Besides, in 1954, when Fitts' paper appeared, it was already understood that this was the case.

I'm not being overly pedantic here -- Archimedes' principle is not that "whether an object sinks or floats depends on what it's made of", that had been known since the dawn of time. Archimedes' contribution was to give it a quantitative formulation, which is what we now call Archimedes' principle -- the force is equal to the weight of the volume of liquid that the immersed object displaces. Similarly, Fitts' law is not that larger targets are easier to hit, that has been understood forever; it's quantifying this statement, and the end result is what we now know as Fitts' law.

Second, the implication "make bigger buttons" is not at all valid in every circumstance -- which is why I warmly suggest reading the actual paper to anyone who cites it.

Fitts' work applies to _repetitive_ movements of equal amplitude and speed, not necessarily made with active cognitive involvement, and assumes that targets are known in advance and -- although not explicitly stated, but implicit in the experiment -- easily distinguishable. It will tell you nothing useful about the size of buttons in dialog boxes, for example. (Edit:) this blind interpretation would also suggest, for example, that making the macOS menu thicker would help, but it doesn't; or that simply making buttons thin, but placing them on top of the screen, would also help -- which holds is only partially true for mouse-driven interfaces, and not at all for touch interfaces.

<comment><USER63> I'm not really interested in these details, and "make bigger buttons" was just an example of what an implication might have been (as indicated by "e.g."). What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the scarcity of information.

<comment><USER65> > What I tried to criticise was the vagueness of the linked page and the > scarcity of information.

So if you are not interested in "these details", but you found the page vague and the information scarce, _what details_ should it have included so as not to be vague?

<comment><USER63> > what details should it have included so as not to be vague?

\- How is the correctness of such "law", expecially in context of UX desgin, is observed?

\- What are practical implications of these "laws", again in the context of UX design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The navigation on this site is so bad I created an account on HN just to mention it.

<comment><USER67> I wish more websites would go back to header/sidebar/content layouts and rather than trying to impress with all the gimmicky crap and random layout, would again start trying to inform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Don't fuck with scrolling that should be a rule.

</comment><comment><USER69> You do realize that this "UX" thing was for decades called "ergonomics" and had a large body of research behind, do you?

<comment><USER70> Did you mean to say 'Usability'

Ergonomics was and still is it's own thing. It very much relates to the physical world exclusively.

<comment><USER69> So a digital interface that is displayed on a screen of a desktop is "UX", but the very same digital interface that is displayed on a touchscreen attached to industrial machine is suddenly a totally different field "ergonomics"? Or does it need physical buttons to be called that?

<comment><USER71> In your case, there would be an overlap. A digital interface is UI. UX is multi disciplinary, it would focus more on the human centered process of building an application that fits the user needs. Ergonomic specialists would take into account the job (task), physical environment, user need, equipement (does the worker wear gloves...). Some are trained to be able to work on both fields (Human factor, cognitive engineer...)

UX could also be called cognitive ergonomics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> The 3rd law is just wrong.

Yes, we spend more time on other sites and therefore, we are used to the UX patterns used on other sites, but that doesn't mean that all other pages are doing good.

Actually, we do not choose the sites we are on purely based on UX patterns. Instead we choose the sites by the service/functionality they are offering.

So assuming that other pages are doing good UX and inventing new patterns will irritate users might be a good advise for junior UX designers, but UX experts should always question the status quo and search for improvements. So defining it as a law to stick to the UX patterns of the majority of sites is just wrong.

<comment><USER72> As the down voter did not care to leave a comment, I try to give an example:

For years we were seeing the burger icon (3 horizontal bars) as an icon for menus. It took quite a while until it became a well known standard to add some 'Menu' text next to it (as you can see it on the Laws of UX page).

So for years we had a pattern on most sites which was not optimal. Just using it because everybody else was using it, didn't solve the problem that a majority of users did not understand or knew the icon.</comment></comment>


I'm Not Japanese - <AUTHOR> http://sachagreif.com/im-not-japanese/ <comment><USER3> >> Does Google assumes that we live in The Matrix, and you can learn a new country's language instantly as soon as you move there? >>

Google is making the (accurate) calculation that over 99% of people coming from a Japanese IP address whose computer says "Accept-Language: en-gb;q=0.9, en;q=0.7" are _actually Japanese speakers of Japanese_ (true preference: "Accept-Language: ja-jp;q=1.0; en;q=0.000001") whose configurations have been borked at the manufacturer or the IT department level, and who will be _terribly served_ by content written in English. It's an act of charity that they even ask about English prior to defaulting you into Japanese. (They haven't always done that -- every year or two it seems to switch for me.)

This is a particularly acute issue since most users of Google don't actually have accounts on it, their best attempts to fix that to the contrary. As a result, in key ways such as language, the service needs to "just work" for the majority of their users. Also, if I was to have a totally clinical view of the situation, the expected value of 1 English speaker in terms of ad clicks is ridiculously below the expected value of 1 Japanese speaker in terms of ad clicks, given that both are in Japan (+), and you're asking to sacrifice 99 Japanese speakers to save the 1 English speaker. Once you accept that there will be a loser in this decision either way, figuring out who the loser should be is not that hard. Sorry: I'd prefer English, too.

>> And by the way, want to check out a post on Blogspot? Off to blogspot.jp you go. This doesn't change the page itself, only the URL. So what does redirecting me accomplish, except make me feel that I'm not in control of what sites I can access? >>

This is a hack around censorship laws in a few places (most relevantly to the instant case, Germany, I believe). Google has a blogspot.jp which is a copy of .com which is a copy of .de which is a copy of... _except_ that they enforce country-specific censorship laws. This was deemed an acceptable tradeoff versus getting all of blogspot blacklisted in e.g. Germany.

n.b. No special inside knowledge here.

(+) If this is not intuitively obvious to you talk to me about AdWords geotargetting and default settings sometime.

<comment><USER4> I am logged on to Google, and they _know_ I want English results and an English interface, because I've gone through and done all the settings. And yet, occasionally something goes wonky and they start showing me the interface in Italian again.

I have no problems if their default is the local language - that's pretty much a no-brainer - but when I've told them in no uncertain terms what my own preferences are, they ought to respect that.

<comment><USER5> Same here. I travel a lot and use VPN to access the corporate network. So if I am in the Chinese office google goes Chinese (and it takes some random guessing to switch the language back to English) then in the hotel (via VPN) it promptly goes German.

One small improvement would be to write the name of the language in the original and not in whatever country's version. (e.g. English instead of Angol, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the most infuriating things about traveling internationally. Sites that probably know more about me than I know about myself assume that I am a native of wherever I happen to be at the moment _and make it difficult- to-impossible to alter that site behavior_.

If I was a completely anonymous user coming in from a location it would be an understandable. But I'm not anonymous, I am logged in to the same account I've been using for a decade that in almost every other use case was US-ian English. So there really isn't any excuse. Absent any active attempt to change settings on my part, that I prefer US-ian centric settings is an easy inference to make even when I travel.

I want to believe there is a rationale for doing things this way but I can't think of one. All it does is make the Internet barely usable when I travel to many countries.

<comment><USER7> All of which is a case for delineating language content by TLD. It's easy enough, with fewer dialect subdirs than the monolithic techniques often employed by sites, but IME TLDs just offer a default with all the complications you describe carried from region to region.

But hey, Google's always been this way. Before you could even log in they used to have a "Settings" pane where you cuold set your language to be saved in a cookie. It would get lost all the time; you'd always have to reset it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of thing pisses me off regularly. Google is one of the worst offenders, completely ignoring browser language preferences.

But American websites in general are awful at this. They completely ignore local diversity and sensitivities and simply assume "one country, one language", so they will for instance happily present Flemish users with French interfaces.

It's fucking offensive. If I type google.com instead of google.nl or google.de or google.co.jp _and_ my browser preferred language is English, I have made it pretty damn clear what I want.

<comment><USER9> It is slightly more offensive to assume that .com + browser settings == english above the country you are originating from, if you aren't speaking english, anyway.

<comment><USER8> Really? The country I'm visiting from says nothing definitive about my language of choice. Absolutely nothing.

Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice. Setting the preferred language of my browser is an even more explicit choice.

How can honoring explicit choices be more offensive than assuming the visitor is an idiot who can't think for themselves?

<comment><USER9> "Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice."

No it isn't, .com is the global domain, not the english one.

<comment><USER10> True, but even Google.us, which abolutely is an American domain extension, is set to thai for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who works every day at a Japanese startup that has a Japanese/English bilingual UI, can generate documents in different languages than the user, multi-currency, Japanese address formatting aware, etc.. I can say that these problems are actually quite hard to get right for most use cases. For most companies it's not worth it.

However, once the user has _logged into your site_ as is the common case with google properties, there is no excuse for serving the page in the wrong language. For months google calendar on my iPhone here in Tokyo would be in Japanese. All of the other tabs on the mobile google site would be English but just google calendar would be Japanese locale. As far as I could tell there was no way to fix it. Then one day it was fixed. I still see this mistake all over the place with other sites.

I actually blame the rise of geo-ip and location databases for enabling the ability to geo-locate users. Something about giving developers the rope to hang themselves with…

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually, this problem also exists for native speakers in their own countries. I'm a German in Germany, yet when I'm searching for technical terms, in the overwhelming majority I want English results because they are better. (The German results are often just blog posts regurgitating what somebody else wrote in English.)

It used to be that I could use www.google.de for German searches, and www.google.com/ncr for English searches, but that does not (reliably) work anymore. I now grudgingly type www.google.com/?hl=en in the address bar more often than not.

<comment><USER13> On Google Search: Options -> Search settings -> Languages

There you can change the language(s) of your search result. I think you can mark up to 10 languages.

<comment><USER14> Google provides those settings but it seems to randomly ignore them or at least I can't discern a pattern.

<comment><USER15> It's not randomly. In work I use Iceweasel for private gmail (and Chrome for company gmail), where I have set Results per page to 100 and chose to Never show Instant results long time ago. It simply does not work!

I go to google.com, start typing and Google starts showing me some instant results and hitting Enter gives me only 10 results per page. (The same settings are respected for non-private gmail in Chrome, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a common expat pita. So you move to a new country, the digital world decides that you now must immerse yourself in that country. And its quite true: the expat demographic is minuscule so why bother accommodating it? Its only because the technical barriers for it not being that way are so low, that we expect the digital world to be different from the physical world, but really, each country has its own commerce laws and you have to essentially "break the rules" to say...operate your iTunes account from a non-local address so you can still buy things in English.

Google isn't so bad as long as you login; in fact the first hint I'm not logged in usually comes from a bunch of Chinese search results. Really, this isn't as big a deal as region coding, Netflix, Hulu, and VPNs that are constantly being attacked by your host government.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you are traveling and Google is trying to send you to a country specific site, you can use this address to tell Google you actually really want to go to Google.com:

      http://www.google.com/ncr

I believe the NCR stands for No Country Redirect.

But as the article points out, many websites make it harder than it aught to be use them from other countries. Some Japenese websites sometimes even actively try to prevent foreigners from using them by require text entry in hiragana and disabling copy-paste with javascript.

<comment><USER12> At least for me, that does not work anymore.

However, <http://www.google.com/?hl=en> works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have experienced the same annoying redirects, even when I correct it - <USER2> again redirect to a geo search site. This has been happening less for some reason. Also I use DuckDuckGo a lot more and don't have that problem.

YouTube is even worse. It has all sorts of data on what I view and like... Yet if I travel it acts as though my preferences have drastically changed. This just seems extremely lame. It is the oposite of "organizing the world's information" sensibly. The only way to see non-hyper local completely unwanted videos is a vpn.

The biggest complaint I have is how windows 3.1 like the whole experience is. Let me make my settings and have those stick. Don't hide preferences in some crazy gui (windows style) and make it some hard to retain your preferences. If they want the default behavior to be that search results have little to do with the person and most to do with the geo location Google thinks you are at fine. Just make it obvious what you are doing (showing me massively manipulated results based on location - and tell me what location you think that is). And let me have a simple way to set my preferences to search based on USA location (or if there is some legal reason this can't be done just tell me so I don't wonder why the results are so crazy).

</comment><comment><USER19> I have a similar compounded problem:

I live in Japan, my systems are configured in English, but when I'm at the office my internet is routed through a proxy which is somehow localized to India (I have no idea where is its actual location).

\- I get Google in English most of the time (though sometimes it will pop back to Japanese)

\- Google account settings on the other hand will most of the time show in Japanese (I'm OK though, I know the language)

\- Search results include Japanese language websites at home

\- I get Japanese ads at home and Indian ads at work, especially funny on Youtube.

\- Google Maps is all over the place though, sometimes showing me Japan, India but also defaulting to US of A...

 _Note:_ you rant about two settings for language, but that makes sense. I want to see the Google interface in English because this is my preferences for interfaces, but I want local search results including Japanese language websites because that is what's useful to me most of the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but as far as I can tell the two settings are not for the Google UI and the Google Search Results (which would make sense). They're for Some Google Products (i.e. Google Plus) and Google Search (both UI and search results).

I might be mistaken on this, but I don't think there is a way to set the search results language independently of the UI language.

<comment><USER19> I just tried it out and found this: <http://i.imgur.com/KL0bW.png>

Interestingly, I did a search through Chrome to get to the Google search results page, I was not logged in and everything was in English. I proceed to login and get reverted to Japanese (not my default). As I said before, my settings keep getting changed automagically all the time...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Desktop applications on Windows are particularly prone to this kind of thing. If you happen to have an english version of Windows, but the locale (timezone, currency) set to another region, many applications assume you also want the interface in that region's language.

This is extremely annoying (especially when there's no way to choose the language manually) and moreso considering there's a way to know the language of the system.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've also had several problems with compilers and IDE. Recent example: Visual C++ detects that my computer has a Japanese environment and switches its messages to Japanese. Qt Creator takes these messages and displays them in its output box, in the process borking them completely (□□□□ etc.), even though _its own interface is in Japanese as well_. Now I couldn't find a switch to make the compiler output English when called on the command line, so I eventually just used VC++ as the main IDE.

A lot of programs require command-line switches on every invocation to change the language if it's not the same as your OS locale.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would really like if they would look at your OS languages and use that. If I am in France (or any other non English speaking country) and I use my English languages device please show me the English site. Also the "you are on a mobile site therefore I show you my crappy mobile site, without the possibility to go do the desktop site" is really annoying especially on a tablet. While most browsers can be set on show desktop site allot of sites just look at the OS. Only browser that works is Opera. TL;DR stop thinking you know better than your users what languages/site format they want.

</comment><comment><USER23> This drives me crazy all the time.

Even my OS and browser are in English and i made search with "English words" ( eg. "operating system" instead of "Betriebssystem" ), search results are in German because i'm in Germany.

At some level it's acceptable but things get weird when i use my girlfriends notebook ( english OS, chinese browser ) : Now google decides to obey "Accept- Language" and even i sign in with my google account, google switch language to Chinese. Since google tries and fails to being "smart" , i have to switch constantly between English, German and Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use Windows with an English localization and most of the software installers irk me to no end by defaulting to French because they don't rely on the system language but my location.

I also hate the fact that I have to do something as cumbersome as putting the browser in private mode whenever I'm using someone else's computer to make a search on the english side of google since, like for japan, google.com redirects to google.fr instead of letting me use the US database so I have to go in the preferences and do so in private mode so as to not mess with the cookies as they wouldn't be pleased if their google permanently turned English even on google.fr. God damn it.

Hey GOOGLE, domain names are not just for show, FFS. If I want the French edition, I'll go to google.fr. If I want it in English, I'll go to google.com. Don't mess with something that worked rather well since the beginning of the Internet.

I hate programmers who try to write "smart" software. Software that makes attempts at thinking in your stead. Fuck off ! I know what I want, you don't need to make annoying guess works.

</comment><comment><USER25> The fix:

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&safe=off&#...
You should be able to configure your search engine pref (at least in Firefox and Chrome) to reflect this.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hate this trend, too. I've always felt that if I go to the .com, then it should offer English by default. If I go to google.co.jp, then you can show me Japanese. Living in Taiwan, I did slowly get used to the traditional Chinese character web. But there's no way I want to or even can go through that every time I take a week-long trip somewhere.

Respect the language settings of my browser, or even my machine as a reasonable default and the world is a better place!

<comment><USER27> Why should .com be an automatic english language domain? It defines no single country.

co.uk co.us co.au

for example, I'd be surprised if they defaulted to anything other than English for a public website. But not .com

<comment><USER26> While .com doesn't define a single country, there was a huge development of US .com sites (and the internet in general) before there was much of an internet presence outside the English speaking world at all. In fact since most browsers (early and modern both) came out of the US, there wasn't even support for some non-roman character sets until later. That's how history went.

Furthermore, English is the single language widely use by travelers, heard in movies and even in local pop songs all over the world. English is the one language in which nearly anyone on the internet can recognize the name of their own language. Anyone in Russia could recognize that "Russian" refers to their own language, but how many Spaniards would realize that "スペイン語" was what they had to click on a Japanese site to find their own language?

Anything other than English would be a _terrible_ default for a .com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rdio, for one, is restricted by its licensing agreements with the record labels.

</comment><comment><USER29> and the worst part is, it can be solved with a simple tiny link/dropdown 'language' in the header or footer, it's not rocket science.

<comment><USER16> ...unless the language menu is itself localized. This happens so often its not funny. Even finding the language menu is hard, since its title often localized also.

<comment><USER30> This bugs the hell out of me, what is wrong with little flag + two letter code to indicate the current language, and maybe a little arrow to indicate that it is a menu you can select from.

<comment><USER31> I agree a drop down list is the nice solution.

But it's not as easy as a bunch of flags and ISO 3166 codes.

What happens for countries where there is no official language and two languages commonly spoken? (US: English and Spanish; Spain: Spanish and Catalon etc etc.)

<comment><USER32> India has 22. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_in_India#Eighth_Schedule_to_the_Constitution)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yahoo Japan thinks I'm a woman despite my Yahoo profile saying otherwise. All I get is ads for women's undies and makeup.

Google's search is pretty bad too, it really pushes me to the Japanese page even though I want English since the results differ. They hide the English page link way at the bottom in small font text and don't make clear that it's the English version.

<comment><USER19> A better explanation is that Yahoo! Japan believes you are a cross-dresser...

<comment><USER34> There definately is a correlation of "coming up with this thought" and "what username do I pick on HN?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> At least Google let's you keep a single account. Apple is awful in this regard. The App Store experience is the _worst_ I've ever experienced with regards to this problem. I despise it. I point to it a shining example of how despite all the credit they get, they can fail hard at basic elements of usability.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google customises its searches to such a degree that I've set up two different quick search keywords in chrome:

ge : will search google.com with primary language = en g : will search google.co.jp with primary language = jp

I get wildly different result sets every time. And usually, one is spot on with what i'm looking for and the other is useless.

</comment><comment><USER37> It gets even better. My OS is in English. My browser is set to English and prefers English. My Android phone is in English. I have Google set to English. At all the 3 different places I could find.

Most of Google is in English. <https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthConfig> is set to German with no possibility to change it (that I can see). The Android market shows me German movies, German books and German games.

I honestly believe the only way to have a decent, single-language experience is to live in a purely English speaking country, never move away, never use a device that was used in a non-English-speaking-country and of course speak English.

Seems to be really hard to save somewhere what someone wants -.-

</comment><comment><USER38> Use Google No Country Redirect.

I struggled with this at length both for my computers and those of my children until I found the obscure google switch:

google.com/ncr

That tells google not to attempt to redirect to local language. You will have to set this in your search preferences as the google search URL.

Hope this helps,

John

</comment><comment><USER39> This drives me crazy when I travel to Korea. I inevitably spend a day or two hunting through preferences to get Google to stop serving me Korean Language pages. Eventually it seems to "stick", but I have to set it back to English at least two or three times.

I never thought about it in terms of personalization, I figured that being in Korea I _should_ be getting Korean pages served to me, and I would have to make the effort to get it back to English.

</comment><comment><USER40> There is also the inverse problem on some input interfaces. I do have to write emails, sms, weibos, HN comments in English, Chinese and French. I don't know how ios handle this issue but on you have to open a thing, tap, close, and it is not very convenient. I use Swype beta, which is actually good, but it is annoying to live in a world where monolingual is the norm.

I have no figure but I'd guess multilingual is actually the norm in many countries.

</comment><comment><USER41> It doesn't make much sense that Google switched languages when you wife _told_ it to? You are kidding right?

And you think you are being fair!!!

</comment><comment><USER42> There is also a minor problem with google play - it shows local currency, and I couldn't find how to switch it to dollars.

</comment><comment><USER43> And amazingly, going to Google Maps still defaults to a map of the US... (edit: when you go to maps.google.com)

<comment><USER44> Well sure. just like ditu.google.cn defaults to a China map. maps.google.co.uk defaults to a UK map, maps.google.fr defaults to France. Google IS an American company, so maybe google.com ought to direct to a US map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps deep down you really want to be Japanese though. Google might know you better than you know yourself.

</comment><comment><USER46> This isn't isolated to google, bing is far worse because it's difficult to switch languages. Then there are a gazillion company product support sites which also default the language for you, particularly tricky when you are looking for a specific driver update.

</comment><comment><USER47> Language settings aside, this guy also completely misses the point of how CDNs and localised data centres work, and why it's beneficial to serve localised content rather than constantly dragging Japanese traffic through American data centres.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe it doesn't work as well as we want it to on the fringes. Maybe, just maybe, there are bugs in their software. I know, it's hard to fathom, bugs in software. Google is not immune to this just because they're Google. The fact that everybody seems to think they are _entitled_ to perfectly working free software products is an amazing testament to the quality of what they produce.

Google products are in fact written by humans, and are therefore imperfect. It will have bugs. So let's all rein in the misplaced outrage and reflect on all the amazing stuff Google provides to us, free of charge.

Then, please go watch this Louis CK clip, and then re-evaluate whether this is worth a blog post.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

</comment><comment><USER49> My girlfriend worked in Spain last year, so I spent about 4 months living in Madrid. I've been back in Australia for 6 months, but the majority of my Facebook ads still show up in Spanish.

</comment><comment><USER50> i was about to post a blog of how angry i am that i see the localized version of google when i change to analytics or change to y adwords account it pisses me off! just give me ENGLISH!

</comment><comment><USER51> To me, the saddest thing about this problem is that the solution is over to just write less code. Be less smart, instigate fewer aggressive redirects to "mobile" sites.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is common. I am spanish living in Germany. If you want to change the language the only thing that works is:

\- Buy a machine in the contry you want and proxy through it.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm Japanese.

I'm customizing my Chrome's ominibox to use both google.com and google.co.jp. And I'm also configuring amazon, wikipedia, googlemap and so on the same way.

</comment><comment><USER54> Lifehacker and other multinational blogs should take note as well.

The cynic in me wants to tell you that you'll only learn Japanese better if you immerse yourself ;)

</comment><comment><USER55> There is a link at the bottom of the home page called "google.com". It has magic powers!

<comment><USER44> Why should I link to google.com when that's what I typed in the first place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The classical mistake of assuming the language should be the same as the locale.

<comment><USER57> A mistake in the sense that it ignores a standard that everyone else ignores, but delivers the correct language to 99.999% of the visitors?

(Hint: most people in Japan speak Japanese. There are 126,000,000 Japanese in Japan, compared to 1,000,000 foreigners. Most of the foreigners are Korean and Chinese and probably understand Japanese just fine. Hell, so do most Americans, probably. My point is: if you're in Japan, it's quite reasonable for a website to default to Japanese.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm sorry but doesn't a VPN solve this problem?

<comment><USER34> It also introduces other problems, like latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> google.com/intl/en/

there you go.

</comment><comment><USER9> _I'm not Japanese._

No shit.

 _But ever since my wife and I moved to Kyoto, the Internet sure seems to think we are._

The internet does not think. Or if it does, it has weird proto-dreams of kittens and porn. But it does not think of you, or your wife.

 _Google is supposedly this big, Skynet-like company that lives to collect data on us._

Stop believing the shiny box. It lies.

 _Yet it's not very smart about language._

Pot. Kettle.

 _As soon as we stepped foot in the land of the rising sun, it asked my wife if she wanted to display Google in Japanese, and she clicked "yes" by mistake._

And unfortunately, it launched the nukes.

 _Not only did Google start showing her its user interface in Japanese, but the real problem was that all her search results were from Japanese sites, too!_

But it didn't launch the nukes after all, but instead did exactly as instructed.

 _And going back seemed impossible._

Here in our story, our protagonist discovers entropy.

 _Going through Google.com instead of Google.co.jp did nothing. Changing her langage settings was just as useless._

My god. Those evil fiends. Is just like that bit in the bible where they build a tower to heaven and stuff.

 _Turns out Google Search uses a different language preference page._

Wooo! We have finality. There are two preference panes. Which are really hard to find if you change language to something you cant read by pressing the wrong buttons.

And furthermore, google are just a big company and have no magic wizards that do magic and stuff. They do not know what you are thinking unless you are within a couple of meters at best. So do not expect things to know what you meant to do but didn't for at least the next 2 years or so.

<comment><USER60> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747>

<comment><USER9> I was being very snarky, admittedly. The article just really irritated me and I was extremely drunk on rum.</comment></comment></comment>


How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/Why-Stack-Overflow-Redesigned-the-Top-Navigation/ <comment><USER2> I like it! I just wish it weren't fixed. The design does indeed add clarity and make it easier to quickly parse compared to the old nav. But it being fixed makes it feel like a design that's trying to coerce me into staying on the site longer. Which is fine (and more and more sites are doing this anyway), but to me it makes Stack Overflow feel a little bit less like a tool, and a little bit more like a company trying to subtly influence my behavior for their profit. But I'm probably reading way too much into this.

<comment><USER3> Users aren't clicking on it? Better shove it in their face so it's noticed.

I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.

IMO, fixed navbars are almost as bad as popups.

<comment><USER2> > I like the solution of not showing the navbar unless the user scrolls up.

Oh man, I've gotta strongly disagree with this. To me, those are just distracting and in practice often end up being fidgety. For tall webpages I think an easy and simple alternative is having a link like top at the bottom of the document or wherever it makes sense. Unfortunately it seems like many designers don't really go for easy and simple.

<comment><USER4> Eh, those links tend to be difficult to find and not very useful in my experience. Usually it's not much harder to just scroll back to the top manually.

Plus the "show on scroll up" bars have the advantage of making it easy to access the top navigation without losing your place on the page, which is useful if you just want to open a link from the top bar in a new tab or quickly check your notifications or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stack Overflow did well with this. Now I wonder if GitHub will chime in with why they decided to redesign their header recently to, in my opinion, a hideous design.

<comment><USER6> The new black header on GH made me think someone famous has passed (like HN did in the past).

<comment><USER7> Same here, I spent good 10 minutes looking at their homepage and blog in hopes of finding an explanation.

<comment><USER8> I took another 5 minutes to find this useful add-on for Safari:

[https://freestyler.ws/style/152684/github-white- header](https://freestyler.ws/style/152684/github-white-header)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _A /B Test with 5% of Anonymous Visitors_

> _A /B Test with 10% of Registered Users with Less than 500 Rep_

These headlines are the biggest lessons for devs in this article. I cannot stress how valuable these anonymous, code-regulated tests are. Once your site has reached any appreciable traffic size, invest some time into how you can segment users for testing feature updates.

While we like to think all new features/updates are positive, the reality is rarely so positive. Anonymous tests are a great way to improve your feature offering without sacrificing the experience of all users.

</comment><comment><USER10> What an idiotic premise, "the logo is the focal point of the page". No, the question and answer are the focal point of the page. Did you learn nothing from the thing that you claimed to have learned something from?

<comment><USER11> StackOverflow is making a whole host of bad decisions lately. I worry for developers everywhere if they keep making missteps like this. Its not like "free Q&A site" is a long-term sustainable business, especially if they keep messing with users like they are.

<comment><USER12> What are the other things they have done?

<comment><USER11> Made a poorly worded statement against the recent travel restrictions, that:

A. Alienated any non left or non-US members

B. Used their position to break their own rules

C. Told the community that they would do A and B again

In the process they alienated a lot of high rep users who are slowly leaving the site. Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted.

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well- always-...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always- endeavor-to-do-whats-right-well-try-to-do-it-better-next-time)

<comment><USER12> You're leaving the site because of a single announcement you didn't agree with?

 _> Myself included, who had my 20k+ account deleted._

What reason did they give for deleting your account?

Where's the original statement?

<comment><USER11> Multiple announcements that I didn't agree with, most of them, in my opinion, focused on them setting a political orthodoxy for the site.

And I requested an account deletion, and from what I can tell I wasn't the only one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks great atm, now it matches the colors of the site. They even recently added it a grey-er background color which makes it different from the content background.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a problem for those wanting to print the page.

The bar obscures text on consecutive pages.

This is an issue for Quora as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> Although I'm not a super-fan of the redesign (99% of the time I prefer words to cryptic icons with hover text), I must say, I do love the openness of Stack Overflow with their blog posts, etc.

It's nice to read about the design decisions that go into a large successful site.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hello! Unsolicited armchair expert here!

I initially came here to say that I also prefer the new design but would appreciate something non-fixed. I realize there's a setting for it but that means I have to login just to get rid of it. Like most people I only read the site. Then I sort of got stuck on the sentence in the article that suggested I might be missing out on some of the things that Stackoverflow has to offer.

I believe I have fairly common workflow. I Google, read the question and all the responses, then open all the referenced questions in new tabs and recursively work my way through them until I have exhausted all the material on the topic. You seem to be very familiar with that type of workflow. It's even mentioned in the article.

But it's also a bit odd when I think about it. I can't recall that I have ever visited Stackoverflow directly. For some reason I always come from Google. Heck, I even type "stackoverflow" into the Google search bar so that your results will come up on top. That's very different from my normal browsing pattern. Usually I go to a site directly. So why am I doing this and what am I missing out on? I decided to take a tour of your site!

1\. The front page isn't very useful to me. I believe you could make an argument that it's not very useful to most people. It displays the new top navigation bar, a large sign inviting me to sign up, lots of low quality questions in wildly different areas less than a minute old. Maybe this is useful to someone else. To me it's about as useful as if Google would show the 10 most recently indexed sites on their landing page.

2\. The top navigation bar didn't really seem to have anything interesting until it struck me that I always search your site with Google. But there is a search feature somewhere... Why is the search bar so small? Why isn't it more prominent? Oh, and it's possible to browse for more interesting topics using tags. I do that sometimes. Why don't I do that more often? Also I should contribute more to Stackoverflow. Why don't I do that?

...

So if you want to change my behavior to be someone who goes to your landing page, searches using your search feature, browses by categories, and monitors familiar topics - then I suggest you try some of the following things:

1\. Make searching and browsing topics the focus of the landing page. (The Google search bar isn't "hidden" in the top navigation)

2\. Remember which topics I'm interested in without requiring me to login.

3\. Change the font on Windows to Segoe UI. ;-)

4\. Change the header to be non-fixed without requiring me to login.

Currently you're just a place where the search results are stored. But I have a hunch that if I'm actively coming to your site and using your services, then I would be more likely to register, login and participate. It would perhaps strengthen my impression of a community. I make no guarantee that my suggestions will work but you could A/B test it using the method described in the article. :)

Thank you for Stackoverflow and keep up the good work!

<comment><USER16> This is an excuse for them making the top menu fixed, but here's a personal fix. You can use a userstyle extension like Stylish. You can then add the following style:

        .so-header {
          position: static !important;
          min-width: 1090px !important;
          box-shadow: none !important;
        }

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Damn, that update renders StackOverflow unsuable in Firefox 3.6.18pre :-(

<comment><USER18> That's an unsupported Firefox release and has nothing to do with Stack Overflow. Upgrade your browser and try again.

Site works fine in the latest Stable and Developer Editions.

<comment><USER17> Well, I think you guys need to update your irony detectors and try again! ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


The story behind the Connecticut deli math sign - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.4167415/the-story-behind-that-connecticut-deli-math-sign-1.4169424 <comment><USER2> Does anyone remember the story about the famous mathematician at (I think) Princeton, who would always pick 3 as a random number in his examples. ("Let's pick a random number, say 3...")

And then he ended up mentoring an entire generation of mathematicians who adopted his habit.

And everyone would always "randomly" pick 3. It became a thing.

It's kind of a variant on the "let L be a group" because the joke relies entirely on the social conventions of a small group of people.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.xkcd.com/221/](https://www.xkcd.com/221/)

<comment><USER4> Also: [http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25](http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25)

<comment><USER5> This actually has a bit of a point behind it, because the digits of Pi [http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.htm...](http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html) feature "999999" much earlier than would be expected if the digits were uniformly distributed. So once that sequence was discovered, it took a lot more work for mathematicians to convince themselves that it is completely "random" (or "normal" in the jargon). It still hasn't been proven though! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Irrationality_and_normality)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love math but I find this whole article and the associated jokes pretty contentless and somewhat boring.

<comment><USER7> Here are a few better ones:

[https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math- jokes-e...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1083/do-good-math-jokes-exist)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mathematicians can have a focus (and corresponding lack of real-world awareness) that puts even us engineers to shame. Once as an undergrad I was taking a class in the math building, and there was a professor blocking the door because he was reading a flyer taped to it about an upcoming symposium or something. I coughed a little to indicate I was there, and he turned, acknowledged my presence, and then went right back to reading the flyer for another fifteen seconds or so.

We love you, you crazy bastards.

<comment> semi-extrinsic There's the classic/apocryphal story as well of the student who stops a math professor in the hallway and asks a complicated question. Professor gives a long, thorough answer, and the student becomes enlightened. Just as the student is about to leave, the professor asks "Wait, which way did I come from?" Student points out "That way", and the professor goes "Great, then I've had lunch."

<comment><USER9> Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor, is generally the source of many of these (probably somewhat apocryphal) stories of 'absent minded professors'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The two maths jokes that I can remember from my undergrad days are:

"What's purple and commutes?" "An abelian grape"

"What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?" "Zorn's Lemon"

Evidently there's something inherently funny about group theory.

<comment><USER11> "What's yellow, normed, and complete?" "A Bananach space."

<comment><USER12> You still missed one, because there are four canonical math fruit jokes: [http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php...](http://www.stoneswww.academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/User:AlexG#Mathematical_Fruit_Jokes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let L be a group.

I actually guffawed at that one. I am SO going to use that.

<comment><USER14> Isn't SO a special orthogonal group, as in the rotational symmetries? Are we in the presence of a really obscure pun?

<comment><USER15> Can someone think of a way to recover the liar's paradox from statements about L being a group?

Because then we can just let L be a Lie(ing) group :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This thread might have been more interesting if it had of read Connecticut deli meth sign.

</comment><comment><USER17> For those wondering, the deli is 5370 km from Reading.

</comment><comment><USER18> world's shortest math joke:

For any epsilon less than zero .....

</comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr: They were down there talking about math one afternoon and the owner of the deli was trying to take the order from one of them and he was a little bit too preoccupied with mathematics to fully engage in the sandwich ordering process.

<comment><USER20> One actually doesn't have to read more than this tl;dr, since the interview in the article is tedious and takes forever to get to the point

<comment><USER21> And the joke is buried at the end!

<comment><USER22> And it isn't a very good joke.

<comment><USER23> That's the best kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> CBC asking the real questions</comment>


Artificial Intelligence Isn't Killing Jobs; It's Killing Business Models - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2018/01/25/artificial-intelligence-isnt-killing-jobs-its-killing-business-models/#42dfa695ea0a <comment><USER2> I wonder if this is a bot account posting this. 0 comments, and a bunch of random tech articles posted.

Also a garbage article (site is laggy, ady, clunky).

Doesn't succinctly explain why AI can't be killing both jobs and business models. It's clearly killing jobs (e.g. warehouse workers for amazon), not sure what to make of this.

\</comment><comment>

Here's what I propose: perform a bot-audit on the site. Pick a certain number of "suspect" accounts, and write code that, if those accounts are logged in, a very very basic captcha is presented. Use data on this to ascertain if botting is a problem on the site, and whether it needs a systemic solution.

<comment><USER3> Yeah forbes is garbage, I'm running a plugin for eliminating such trash sites from chrome google search results. Anyone know of a way to filter out sources on HN?

<comment><USER4> I read HN through rss feed of hnapp.com

"score>20 -apple -founder -investor -host:nytimes.com -host:bloomberg.com -host:wsj.com" gives more tech, less current events noise. You will need to add -host:forbes.com to the list

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My buzzword bingo overloaded when the word disrupt seemed to appear in every second sentence...</comment>


PlatformLayer adds Solr-as-a-service, 1 day after AWS CloudSearch launch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.justinsb.com/blog/2012/04/14/platformlayer_solr_as_a_service/

<comment><USER2> While the cloudSearch config does look kind of clunky compared to SOLR, it is kind of FUDDY if you're implying that cloudsearch won't let you configure these at all: tokenizers, stemmers, scoring, ISO latin to ASCII mapping, stuff like that

[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/cloudsearch/latest/develop...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/cloudsearch/latest/developerguide/stemmingopts.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. What I've found with aws is that it all looks good until you want to do anything beyond the basics. Then you spend a lot of time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting to get around the aws limitations. With solr and lucene, you can create whatever you want.

It reminds me of the whole "share-cropper" argument.

That said, the auto sharding is pretty cool. We will probably have to wait for the next version of solr for comparable simplicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need to apologize: I hate it when people respond with assertions, rather than facts; and I did that myself there. Sorry!

So; taking stemming as a concrete example:

* With Lucene/Solr, stemming is done with a pluggable class; you can write your rules as a series of exceptions, word by word, but really you'll want to write code for anything non-trivial. Here's an example for Norwegian: [http://e-mats.org/2009/05/modifying-a-lucene-snowball-stemme...](http://e-mats.org/2009/05/modifying-a-lucene-snowball-stemmer/)

AWS only allows word-by-word exceptions, and only allows 500KB. If you need more than 500KB, look like it's more undifferentiated heavy lifting for you...

* With AWS "some basic algorithmic stemming is always performed, such as removing plural suffixes". I think that means you can't turn it off. A lot more documentation is needed there, not least as to what these immutable rules are.

* Solr ships with a bunch of different languages built in; AWS appears only to support English (although I can't believe this is right!)

I'm sure AWS will fix some of these points eventually; but they might not consider it worthwhile to do so, or may not do so on your schedule. With open source, you always have an option.

And this is just stemming! With scoring functions, you're limited to the AWS mini-language, rather than being able to write whatever you want. etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "7 bullets vs 3 bullets. PlatformLayer is more than twice as good!"

'nough said. I'm with PlatformLayer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Which service should PlatformLayer add next?</comment>


Facebook Whose Support Made FOSTA Law, Now Sued for Facilitating Sex Trafficking - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181008/17533740793/facebook-whose-support-made-fosta-law-now-sued-facilitating-sex-trafficking-under-fosta.shtml <comment><USER2> FOSTA and SESTA are ridiculous laws that both restrict freedom on the web and also make it harder for law enforcement to track down real sex trafficking. I'm not sure what could realistically be done about them though.

<comment><USER3> It also gives power back to the pimps and abusers over the people it was meant to "protect".

In reality these laws were just another way to punish women who work in the sex industry. If it were about actually protecting them they would have made laws that target the people in power and the clients the target of enforcement.

<comment><USER2> This is the standard for many US laws unfortunately. If you're captive as a sex slave, you're turned into a criminal. Minors can be arrested for prostitution. It's absurd.</comment></comment></comment>