[HN Gopher] How to make sense of any mess
___________________________________________________________________
How to make sense of any mess
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 390 points
Date : 2025-09-22 14:31 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| OODA loops are everywhere
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
| mvellandi wrote:
| Abby is awesome and an old friend from NYC ux & information
| architecture scene in early 2010s. Her book is great, and like
| others mention, the homepage is just the TOC. Go buy it!
| Ultimately, the mess is yours to make it helpful for
| stakeholders.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| Could you post the names of some influential books or articles
| from the Information Architecture scene?
|
| I've never heard of it, but I'm impressed by OP's website and
| I'm interested in learning more.
|
| edit: There's a whole list in the website.
|
| edit (pt. 2): How would you compare the Information
| Architecture scene to the Effective Altruism scene? Are these
| scenes linked/overlapping in any particular way?
| mvellandi wrote:
| No link. IA only concerned with organizing info for various
| mediums and its UX to meet org and individual goals
| gowld wrote:
| Can you gently suggest that she consult her information
| architect community to help her make her website human
| readable?
| alexpotato wrote:
| In almost 20 years of working in FinTech at various banks, hedge
| funds startup etc, a lot of this rings true.
|
| e.g.
|
| - Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both
| laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be
| parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used
| and 90% of the time they are used it's b/c I made one
|
| - SO many important processes are not documented so people can't
| even opine about how to fix them. I once documented a process and
| everyone agreed step 4 was wrong. What was amazing is no one
| agreed on what step 4 actually was.
|
| - Most of the big arguments I've seen about projects are less
| "what should we do" but more "when do we want it" e.g. one party
| want's it next week but another one wants to have more features
| so it will take longer. [1] I've often dealt with this by using
| the following metaphor:
|
| "Oh, so you want to move house every two weeks?
|
| If you give me six months I'll build you the world's most amazing
| Winnebago/RV with a hot tub, satellite TV, queen size bed and
| A/C.
|
| If you want it tomorrow I'm going to give you a wheelbarrow,
| pillow and an iPad."
|
| 0 -
| https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/67/2-flow-d...
| and
| https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/71/6-swim-l...
|
| 1-
| https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/51/reality-...
| miroljub wrote:
| Thanks. This single comment provided more value than a page
| itself.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for
| both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be
| parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them
| used...
|
| Making technically good decisions is one of a distressing
| number of domains where making any attempt at all will put
| someone a long way ahead of the game vs most people who wield
| power. Several advanced techniques that nearly nobody seems to
| do:
|
| "Do we have evidence that this is a good idea?"
|
| "What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of
| this action, based on past experience and checking what
| happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?"
| [0]
|
| "Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be
| in 12 months?"
|
| [0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate
| next time they're trying to start a war.
| bombcar wrote:
| 99% of all leadership is making a decision and then asking
| for data to support that decision unfortunately.
| balderdash wrote:
| I've literally never seen that happen. It's always problem,
| initial hypothesis, request for data (then data is either
| unavailable or typically supports the hypothesis,
| occasionally the data doesn't and you go back to the
| drawing board.
| morkalork wrote:
| Have you worked on a data team? I've seen that bs a
| number of times, it's how I mentally grade different
| managers and PM/POs.
|
| Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big
| change, get told what devs are missing and need to
| instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for
| the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the
| changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too
| hard or impossible to check.
| balderdash wrote:
| I'm sure it does happen but a number of times does not
| come close to all (99%)
| bsoles wrote:
| Like when my company's bosses decided:
|
| - (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is
| essential for innovation and collaboration.
|
| - (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our
| productivity did not decline.
|
| - (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is
| essential for innovation and collaboration.
|
| And always supported with "data".
| dataflow wrote:
| Those are not contradictory.
|
| Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.
| regular_trash wrote:
| I think the point was that they are contradictory, yet
| "data" was shown to indicate they were each sound
| decisions, implying an inherent dishonesty and
| willingness to bend data to support an already drawn
| conclusion.
| dataflow wrote:
| No, I'm stating that those _aren 't_ contradictory.
| Perhaps they were inaccurate paraphrases of statements
| that _were_ contradictory, I have no idea. But taking
| what 's written at face value, they are not hard to
| reconcile. E.g., being productive doesn't necessarily
| imply innovating.
| james_marks wrote:
| Not hard to reconcile _if you try in good faith to do so,
| with the necessary faculties, interest, time, and
| access_.
|
| This caveat pretty much defines reality.
| Aurornis wrote:
| COVID wfh was a weird time. The company I worked for was
| remote before COVID. Oddly, COVID was a boost to
| basically every metric, including the ones not tracked
| for productivity like even number of Slack messages sent
| or raw number of PRs. I think everyone was just closed
| off from their out of house obligations, especially
| families with kids who went to a lot of activities that
| got cancelled. So they worked instead or were just more
| rested and less exhausted from everything else in their
| lives.
|
| The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote
| during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of
| remote candidates with not so great intent: The
| overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side
| hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while
| they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek
| people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack
| once a day or other people who generally just weren't
| interested in actually doing work while remote. It
| started to add up over time. There were also the people
| who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they
| worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some
| reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a
| funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It
| really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck
| with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason
| everything changed when everyone started WFH.
| venatiodecorus wrote:
| not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were
| used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or
| getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the
| coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained
| our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had
| worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure
| from anything they had ever known.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I'll settle for making decisions. Most leaders can't even
| do that
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is also - disturbingly - how the human brain operates.
|
| 1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about
| what course of action is most beneficial for you.
|
| 2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up
| with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally
| right thing to do.
|
| 3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing,
| and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!
|
| I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer
| brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you
| have to accept that well functioning human organizations
| don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such
| organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they
| work.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| "If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will
| confess to anything"
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > [0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US
| debate next time they're trying to start a war.
|
| Speaking as someone with 20 years in uniform and as a War
| College grad (if only by correspondence) . . . the military
| ironically has this wired more than any other institution in
| the Federal government. The reason the military gets drawn
| into so much of US foreign policy is not because of a fetish
| for blowing things up. It's because it's the only institution
| where formalized planning is a thing, the only one where
| feats of large-scale logistics are par for the course, and
| the only one where "I'm not going there because I might get
| hurt" isn't a valid excuse.
|
| As an example, one of the best ways for distributing aid
| after a natural disaster is an amphibious task force, because
| you can send the same Marines in to distribute aid that you
| would to take territory. And going into relatively unprepared
| areas and setting up infrastructure for follow-on forces is
| basically their bit either way.
|
| The problem comes in because military force is never the
| complete solution in and of itself outside of something like
| what's currently happening in Ukraine. And when you involve
| all the other agencies plus scads of glory-seeking
| politicians, it's hard to keep things from becoming a
| shitshow.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > outside of something like what's currently happening in
| Ukraine.
|
| Typical slippery slope. "The problem comes in because
| military force is never the complete solution in and of
| itself outside of something like <insert any use of army>"
| lesuorac wrote:
| Even just the military won't solve the Ukraine. Like lets
| say superman comes down and lasers all the Russians.
|
| Who gets what land? What happens to the people whose
| houses are destroyed? What happens to those whose farms
| are litered with landmines?
|
| This is the posters point. The military can execute on a
| lot of things effectively but in order to go from 80% to
| 100% you need more than just them.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| We have answers to all these questions, or can find them,
| but they can't be implemented in an active warzone.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Seems pretty simple unless you are secretly stanning for
| the orcs. Ownership of the land should revert to the
| _status quo ante_ before Putin 's initial incursion into
| Crimea. Those whose property has been destroyed or mined
| should be compensated with seized Russian assets.
| Kidnapped Ukrainian children should be returned to what's
| left of their families.
|
| What alternatives would be more fair, from your
| perspective?
| strken wrote:
| I read this as a logistical question rather than a moral
| one. What happens when two farmers can't agree on where
| their property boundaries sat prior to the war, the
| fences got ripped out after one side used the area as a
| staging ground, and any records have been blown up by
| glide bombs? What happens to the real, physical land
| that's covered in mines and needs to be either cleared or
| fenced? Where can Maria and her family stay tonight, next
| week, and where will they end up? These aren't
| (necessarily) problems for the military to solve.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Good points all. Like the other poster said, though,
| first the war must end. It's to our shame (meaning the
| West's) that Ukraine isn't well into the suing-Russia-
| for-reparations phase.
| fasbiner wrote:
| You're being downvoted because that's not a slippery
| slope argument familiar to the mostly US-based readership
| and it's hard to tell if you're crazy or not.
|
| Ie, the US identifies very strongly with three wars
| (revolutionary, civil, and ww2) where military force was
| a necessary but not sufficient condition. Ie, the US lost
| in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having a far more
| favorable balance of military forces because they could
| never find a political solution. If you were taught that
| wars are won by force alone, you were miseducated.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome
| of this action, based on past experience and checking what
| happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good
| idea?" [0]
|
| I've tried exactly this and it was shocking to me that even
| when faced with examples of _themselves_ failing to do
| something, people would just willingly go on the record with
| this:
|
| Lindsay: Well, did it work for [us last time]? Tobias: No, it
| never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves
| into thinking it might, but ... But it might work [this
| time].
| milesvp wrote:
| "Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we
| be in 12 months?"
|
| I find this one interesting, a business youtuber I follow
| said he finally realized that his teams all got ~5% better
| every year if he just left them alone and changed nothing. He
| said he used to have all these ideas he wanted to implement,
| but that if they didn't have a lot of potential upside, they
| weren't worth the short term drops associated with
| reimplementing, retraining and the teams having to relearn
| and explore their new problem space.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The degree to which people can disagree on what things are is
| very impressive. It once took me weeks to get a company to go
| from 12 definitions of user retention to 4...
| hobs wrote:
| I have had people have vicious arguments what a user even
| was. I just setup a system where custom definitions are
| allowed because if you want to argue do it with someone who
| gives a damn.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Flow diagrams are criminally underused
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, but hammers are overused.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've seen this a lot, too, but only in specific company
| cultures. The common problem among all of them was that people
| in middle upper management thrived in chaos. They didn't want
| the important things to be well documented or stable because
| that took away their opportunities to be the important person
| who held the secret knowledge to make things work. When
| something broke they wanted it to remain impenetrable for other
| teams so they could come in as the heroes.
|
| Oddly enough, these same people would be the ones pushing for
| documentation and trying to stonewall other teams' work for not
| being documented enough. It was like they knew the game they
| were playing but wanted to project an image of being the people
| against the issue, not the ones causing the problem. Also,
| forcing other teams to document their work makes it easy for
| you to heroically come in and save the day.
| vkou wrote:
| I mean, asking for other people to document their work takes
| _zero_ effort.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Asking doesn't always mean it will happen. It also depends
| on how many times you ask, and which method you're asking.
|
| I've had countless conversations about this with examples.
| Still, tickets remain some variation of "called, did some
| troubleshooting, fixed it".
| foobarian wrote:
| In the couple of instances I experienced this, the problem
| is that the system is like the proverbial elephant that a
| bunch of blind people are familiar with through touching
| the parts they are next to; but the complexity is in the
| relationships in-between.
|
| There needs to be a person who will take charge and
| learn/document the whole system, except people who work on
| it are overloaded and too exhausted to take this on. And
| management doesn't necessarily have the insight or
| incentive to make this happen. It's an interesting
| phenomenon.
| EFreethought wrote:
| What software can be used to make Critical path/flow diagrams?
| yread wrote:
| You can embed mermaid uml markup in github and gitlab issues
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| On a similar note, you can embed Draw.io markup when
| exporting Draw.io diagrams, meaning the image contains the
| metadata required to open, modify, and generate a new image
| (which itself can also contain the new metadata).
|
| Mermaid has its place, but Draw.io is so much more
| flexible.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was merged onto a team because we decided to put more wood
| behind fewer arrows. So I was the Outsider but with seniority
| and pull (people loved my project and thought we did great, we
| just couldn't sell it.)
|
| One of the first big problems I solved was almost by accident.
| We had a backend and a frontend team and we kept missing
| deadlines because they would work separately on features and
| the two wouldn't mate up so we'd have to do another couple
| iterations to make everything work and "work" belonged in air
| quotes because things were hammered to fit.
|
| The biggest of the problems encountered here was data
| dependencies in the inputs resulting in loops in the APIs where
| you couldn't get one piece of data without another, and vice
| versa. So we started drawing data dependency diagrams during
| the planning meetings as an experiment, instead of diagramming
| the data structures, and the problem went away basically
| overnight.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've observed that messes and complexity often but not always
| tends to just be noisy information streams. If you try to make a
| decision based on large volumes of low quality data, the world
| feels incredibly complex and constantly shifting and self-
| contradictory.
|
| If you manage to improve the signal to noise ratio it feels a lot
| more manageable and understandable.
|
| Worked with an enterprise architect once who couldn't say
| anything that didn't start with "in this complex and ever
| changing information landscape". You built this complex and ever
| changing information landscape, sir. It consists of your
| hexagonal architecture, your microservices, your kubernetes
| cluster.
| radarthreat wrote:
| This is giving big TimeCube vibes
| cjbarber wrote:
| This reminds me of https://basecamp.com/shapeup
| gowld wrote:
| Frequeently submitted, rarely engaged:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| Not quite the same as this submission, but a better place to
| start for most people.
| balderdash wrote:
| My experience is that one mess is pretty straightforward, what is
| debilitating is interconnected messes.
|
| System A is the highest priority fix and we want to incorporate
| parts of system B into system A (they never should have been in
| B) but if we move them to system A, the other parts of system B
| will break (so we need to fix those) and then additionally system
| C will no longer work so we need to fix that, and on and on...
| pimlottc wrote:
| I was a bit confused by this until I realized that this is just a
| table of contents and the sentences in each chapter are links.
| They are not obviously styled like hyperlinks.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Oh! Thank you, I was totally lost and thought it was some weird
| stream of consciousness or something.
| Voklen wrote:
| Ohhh I did think this was some interesting poetry...
| Lockranor wrote:
| I did the same thing. Very Zen...
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| One trick that I always fall back on is to make a dependency
| graph. In meetings I used to pull up yuml.com but now I use
| mermaid. You can just start typing text and arrows and it renders
| in real time what depends on what. It's great in a live meeting
| to help focus people on where the problem really is, or in
| documentation to show why a change here will affect something
| there.
|
| Both yuml and mermaid don't get you control over layout. I think
| that's a feature. If the layout engine can make a pretty picture
| that means your dependencies aren't too complex, but if the graph
| looks terrible and complicated, that means you're system is also
| probably terrible and complicated.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Totally agree on the lack of layout control being a hidden
| strength. When the graph looks like spaghetti, that's not a
| tool issue - it's a systems issue
| loa_in_ wrote:
| To save others confusion, it's not yuml.com but yuml.me, a UML
| diagramming tool
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| Sorry, you're right. It's been so long since I used it, I
| forgot that it wasn't a .com domain.
| w10-1 wrote:
| mermaid layout doesn't scale for me so I keep using yEd/yFiles
| and their tgf (trivial graph format -- tab-delimited relations)
| input with orthogonal layout. It's a bit of a hassle in a
| meeting but updates take about 15 seconds to refresh if you
| have everything set up. Automating it fully would require an
| expensive license.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Messes can be eliminated - just understood, shaped, and navigated
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Did you mean "can't"?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Reminds me of pilots' decision making process:
|
| - Situation: The pilot is required to recognize the current
| situation and identify the possible dangers. This is the most
| important step of the decision-making process since detecting the
| situation accurately gives the critical information to start the
| process correctly and produce a feasible resolution to the
| impending situation.
|
| - Options: Generate any possible option regardless of the
| feasibility of success. It is most important to create as many
| options as possible since there will be a larger pool of options
| to choose the most appropriate solution to the situation.
|
| - Choose: From the options generated, the pilot is required to
| choose a course of action assessing the risks and viability. Act:
| Act upon the plan while flying in accordance with safety and time
| availability. The most important step of this process is time, as
| the pilot is challenged against time to fix the problem before
| the situation further deteriorates.
|
| - Evaluate: Ask the question, "Has the selected action been
| successful?" and evaluate your plan to prepare for future
| occurrences.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_decision_making#Decision...
| bityard wrote:
| There are so many good concepts to borrow from in pilot
| training, it's almost ridiculous. I'm not even a pilot but have
| studied risk management, crew resource management, decision
| making, etc. Anecdata of course but I feel it made a pretty big
| difference in dealing with projects and problems.
| tclancy wrote:
| Atul Gawande made a book out of the idea (well, sort of!),
| https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/. The
| original article is at
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
| xp84 wrote:
| I've been increasingly addicted to Mentour Pilot videos in
| the past month, and I couldn't agree more with you. Modern
| (and by this I mean really 1990s+) pilot training, with its
| decision frameworks and CRM ideas, is a model for how most
| professionals ought to organize their work and deal with
| challenges. Of course it's easy to see why aviation developed
| such rigorous systems, but we'd do well to steal as many of
| their ideas as we can. If anyone isn't already really
| familiar with those two concepts especially, I bet it would
| be worth your time to look into them a bit.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Mentour Pilot is quite good, especially their older videos,
| tho recently they are moving to stronger engagement farming
| since they sold to private equity
| (https://www.electrify.video/post/electrify-video-partners-
| ex...)
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| If you don't already, check out Admiral Cloudberg's write-
| ups. She started doing research for MentourPilot last year,
| but has a few years of previous articles that'll wiki-hole
| you real good.
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_
| strategist... and OODA loops
| theologic wrote:
| At the time of the FAA making up this framework, I would
| venture more than half of commercial pilots had some
| military aviation background. It is so close to Boyd's
| model, I would think that a research might find that it was
| highly inspired if not a direct descendant of Boyd's work.
|
| However, Body was real time combat, and I think the FAA is
| supposed to be beyond a cockpit crisis, and maybe another
| framework is Demings PDCA framework, which looks like you
| could roughly match the pieces.
| csours wrote:
| Designed by History vs. Designed by Intent
|
| ---
|
| Working on a legacy codebase last year I kept repeating to
| myself: They made it work, they didn't make it sensible.
| hitekker wrote:
| You can't talk about messes without talking about Garbage. When a
| mess is inevitable, maybe even on purpose. Landfills, toxic waste
| dumps; every organization has them, needs them.
|
| I once worked in a department that was a dumping ground for
| failed projects. A 10 year long mess; it was both constant
| garbage and an essential scapegoat. A mess that everyone can
| blame, from the C-suite, to peer organizations, to even the
| people who worked inside the org.
|
| Wikipedia has a great primer on the topic, which I think is more
| incisive than the OP's holistic framework
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
|
| All: " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| It's not that these things aren't annoying--it's that they _are_
| annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion
| that in the end drowns out anything that 's actually interesting.
| Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the
| thread there.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pards wrote:
| The random word highlighting makes it hard to read for me.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Yeah the 3 word lines one after another is god awful.
| jcolman wrote:
| This is a table of contents. Those are the names of
| sections. You can click on them to go to pages of more
| normally formatted paragraphs.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| The paragraphs on all pages are formatted quite narrowly,
| displaying only 3 - 6 words per line.
|
| If this bothers people, it can also be changed with
| Stylebot or the like, using a rule like this to change
| the max-width, which is set to 400px, to a larger value:
|
| p, ul, li { max-width: 800px; }
| roxolotl wrote:
| I suspect that's how they help you make sense of a mess. If
| you can get through the styling you can survive anything.
| frereubu wrote:
| This should definitely be an option you can turn on or off.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| So far I'm not finding it that bothersome but I'm thinking of
| vibe coding a chrome extension to remove the highlighting.
| latexr wrote:
| The solution is literally one line.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386340
| bildung wrote:
| From the start of the book:
|
| "Each time you see a word that is highlighted, [...] it means
| that this term is a lexicon enabled term. By clicking on that
| term, you will see a page listing all other uses of that term
| within the book."
| gowld wrote:
| Very helpful for people who need to be constantly reminded
| to have top-of-mind instant access to the definition of
| words like "thing" and "what", at all times.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| If you have Stylebot or the like installed, you can get rid
| of the highlighting with:
|
| a { background-color: transparent; }
| nodoodles wrote:
| Here's a bookmarklet:
| javascript:document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(el =>
| el.style.backgroundColor = 'transparent')
| jennyholzer wrote:
| I am highly impressed by the lexicon feature, but I think it
| would be nice if you could disable the highlighting
| abtinf wrote:
| This is such a difficult to read site. I can't quite put my
| finger on it... maybe it's the vertical spacing that requires a
| ton of scrolling and lets you see only limited context. The
| word highlighting doesn't help.
|
| I suspect it's intentionally designed to be unpleasant to
| encourage book sales.
| latexr wrote:
| > I suspect it's intentionally designed to be unpleasant to
| encourage book sales.
|
| If you're reading a book preview and have an awful time of
| it, why would that encourage you to buy the book? You're more
| likely to close the site and move away.
| prashantsengar wrote:
| It is also a lot of work (and intuitive) to publish all the
| content on a website and then intentionally make it
| unpleasant to read just to encourage book sales.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| When the presentation of the website has the appearance
| of being deliberately terrible, then I (for one) am lead
| to presume that the corresponding book will be just as
| disdainful.
| zahlman wrote:
| I actually quite appreciate the use of hypertext.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Sure, but you could also have a more useful visual design
| while maintaining that. The problem with the site, on
| mobile at least, is the lack of visual hierarchy through
| spacing, text weight, and implied lines because you might
| only see one or two red chapter titles on screen at any
| given time. I get that they were trying to stick with a
| visual motif and the red text does make the chapter titles
| stick out-- it would work great in print or maybe on a big
| monitor when you could see it all at once. But if you have
| to scroll through it, I found it pretty irritating to have
| no way to visually orient yourself.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Yeah the typography is pretty poor. When everything is bold,
| nothing is. Poor visual hierarchy and as you noted the
| vertical spacing is bad too. It also doesn't fully fit in
| horizontally on mobile.
| AnEro wrote:
| >I suspect it's intentionally designed to be unpleasant to
| encourage book sales.
|
| Probably a mix of a style choice that didn't hit, and how
| pages were split up so it isn't as convenient as reading the
| book.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I suspect it's intentionally designed to be unpleasant to
| encourage book sales.
|
| If it works, they'd be dumb not to. (For the record, I don't
| think it works, and I don't think that was their intent.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Agreed. Having such a tiny amount of text per page is an
| antipattern -- scrolling is more ergonomic than finding and
| clicking a link to go to the next page.
|
| And the columns are painfully narrow which impedes
| readability. Overly wide body text is often a problem people
| recognize, but overly narrow is equally problematic.
|
| It's a very strange experience to have to scroll to read all
| the text, even when there's barely any text to begin with.
| allenu wrote:
| It's frustrating because the content here looks like it could
| be good. It feels like it was thrown together quickly. If you
| click the "Chapter 1" it just takes you a page with just the
| chapter title on it. Seems like they split the book into
| sections and fed each section into a template and said good
| enough.
|
| The highlighted links are incredibly off-putting, like buying
| a second-hand book that someone has already highlighted. The
| readable text is so narrow and small, but the sections are so
| short that you immediately hit the massive "Buy a Book"
| upsell banner at the bottom, which distracts you. All of this
| makes it hard to focus on the _text_ itself.
|
| I'll never understand sites that have way too many links in
| their articles. Am I mean to click away as I'm reading a
| paragraph? Do you want me to stay on the article or do you
| want me to be distracted and go somewhere else?
| raincole wrote:
| [flagged]
| velcrovan wrote:
| In what ways did 37signals innovate in any of those 3 areas?
| raincole wrote:
| They didn't. 37signals books are basically "how to make
| self-help books that look like slideshows." And this site
| looks like their uglier cousin:
|
| https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter1/19/every-
| th...
|
| I think most people can't write nothingness like this even
| if they try very hard. And if they achieve that they can't
| make the emphasis this ugly.
| velcrovan wrote:
| You could take a page out of "The Timeless Way of
| Building" and make the same comment. True, a page of
| writing that goes all the way down to the axiomatic and
| obvious comes off as low-effort. But as part of a much
| larger project, it can also indicate someone who has
| thought deeply about a topic and is willing to spend time
| constructing it from first principles.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| The website is a hot mess, mostly bc its layout is strangely
| "off"; its text requires just a little horizontal scrolling to
| reach the end of many lines. I'll never understand the lengths
| people go to to break the standard default rendering of text on
| the web. There might be good ideas here but the mobile
| presentation is ~unusable.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Seriously. Just using plain HTML would have resulted in
| readable text lines. All the web designer had to do was: "not
| do whatever he deliberately did that made it worse."
| jennyholzer wrote:
| I want to provide a counter perspective, which is that I am
| very happy with way in which the website deconstructs the
| book into short "articles".
|
| What I mean is that I think this website (at least from my
| perspective) has a successful, novel approach to representing
| books on the web.
|
| I don't mean to discount your point. UX issues are very
| serious and can ruin an otherwise carefully presented work.
| My point is that despite these issues, I am impressed by the
| creator's approach to the website.
| procaryote wrote:
| It renders as individual pages for me. An article (as in
| one html page) per chapter would probably be easier to
| read. Now they've forced constraints onto it that makes
| sense for paper but not a website
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Is this website a satirical art piece?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| [flagged]
| Lammy wrote:
| I just miss the days when Hyperlinks were underlined to show
| that they were clickable. I thought this was, like, a poem or
| something at first until I realized they were chapter links
| to other pages.
| cheema33 wrote:
| [flagged]
| groby_b wrote:
| And you start with the mess that this website is...
|
| Seriously, a paginated interface for longtext? Hyperlinks not
| styled as hyperlinks? Text with random highlights? And most of
| the short blurbs really just more words without any additional
| clarification?
|
| You make sense of a mess by having the ability to organize
| thought & data, and I am 100% convinced that the author does
| not have that ability.
| arduanika wrote:
| Sorry dang, but I have to disagree. Nothing about this site
| design is "too common to be interesting." The whole thing is
| highly irregular. In an extreme case like this, the weirdness
| of the layout has to be considered a *principle feature* of the
| website, not a side distraction. Another commenter mentioned
| Time Cube, and that's not far off.
|
| Commenters are correct that the whole thing reads like a meta
| joke, where the site itself is a mess. We have to at least
| consider the possibility that the author is in on the joke.
|
| Petition to eliminate this stub, and merge this discussion of
| *the website's primary distinguishing feature* into the main
| conversation.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Just wanna express my thanks to all the complaining comments
| here, they helped me set expectations so that I wasn't too
| disappointed when the site actually did turn out to be an
| unreadable hot mess.
| dang wrote:
| All: " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| It's not that these things aren't annoying--it's that they _are_
| annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic discussion that in
| the end drowns out anything that 's actually interesting. Since
| that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread
| there. (I've moved these complaints to a stubthread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 - if anyone has an
| urge to reply, it would be fine to do so there)
|
| (p.s. what look like chapter headings in the OP are in fact
| hyperlinks)
| Mobius01 wrote:
| Interesting to see it crop up here. I met Ms. Covert when she
| released the book and have a signed copy around here somewhere.
| It remains relevant as ever, and has value well beyond UX
| practices. It's a short read too, I recommend it.
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