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(This post was almost titled "Improving UI Designs", a haughty parable containing 4 paragraphs of my self-important rambling intended to impart my lofty design wisdom upon you lowly masses. But it read exactly like a Jason Fried article, so I couldn't bring myself to publish it. Instead, here's the short and sweet:)
Presenting a list of blog post comments should be a pretty simple design problem. And there's nothing really wrong with this design: 
Now, associating a label with a value has got to be one of the oldest design problems ever (think tax forms), and so you'd think that we would have nailed it by now. But if you look at the same list of blog post comments once you've scrolled down a bit, you'd see this:
This design offers a 50% chance that your user will think the middle post was made by "Jason" instead of "ShirtBloke". Best case, if your user wants to know who he should send his angry flame at for maligning The Eagles, he would have to laboriously scroll to the top of the list of comments to figure out which name goes with which post.
Worst case, your user will wrongly send the flame to Jason, and Jason will turn out to be the president of a nuclear super-power who is having a very bad day, and World War III will erupt, extinguishing all life on the planet. (I said it was worst-case.) So remember, if you don't want to have the blood of every living thing on your hands, don't be stingy with the goddamned whitespace. |
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