Chances are slim that someone from GitHub will read this, but the text in this post (and other posts in the Changelog category) would be much more readable if there was more contrast between the text and the background (now it's dark grey text on black background).
This also depends on the screen you're using. Older LCD screens sometimes don't show colors/contrast that are super clear on newer displays. Not saying your comment is invalid, just something I've noticed.
It's great to add new features, but couldn't GitHub fix the essential ones first?
Just this week, I encountered the following problems:
- a diff showing "0 files changed" while there are many [1];
- suggested changes in a PR not rendering the original line [2];
- bug trackers not showing more than the 40th page [3].
Might seem nitpicky but it was just over the last week... I have a whole bunch of other bugs on my mind, and unfortunately, it's only gotten worse over the years. To the point where I almost don't care anymore.
This has noticeably worse info density compared to https://github.com/notifications, https://github.com/issues and https://github.com/pulls. Those old pages' list entries have padding-top: 8px and padding-bottom: 10px. This new dashboard's list entries have padding: 16px. Just why? It’s definitely more relevant though, overall a positive.
Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here. This is probably one of the few actual improvements github has made to UX in a while, normally when I visit I want to be looking for my things to do, not the social feed (though, I do like to explore the social feed sometimes, so, its not like its totally irrelevant, its just not the reason I go there).
Maybe that was the point, if its not front and center then nobody will use the social features.
Regardless, I think its hard to balance UI for normies and UI for techies, I think theres also a lot of brogrammers who might think they like being techies but their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency.
Personally, I have a negative almost visceral reaction when my tools change, because I learn my tools intimately and create expectations of where things will be- but this is also why I avoid tools which don’t have consistency in their UI too.
I get design/product people sometime that get all caught up in "we need to simplify" or there's not enough whitespace. Every time, the design/product person is not a user of the product, and the result is you ship their improvements, get blistering angry feedback (last time I even got the most prolific user and recommeder of our product calling me on my cell at 11pm) and revert.
> their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency
Exactly this. I think is speaks more to how frequently the designer uses the product versus actual users, and they don't understand the difference between UX for casual/infrequent users and people who spend all day in the product.
I’m not at all. People around here love to hate GitHub, and think any change to a product or design is incredibly regressive. These to combine and people lose their minds.
Sidebar topic: (analog or digital) Work Tracking Systems for solo/tiny team sizes.
Central Question: What pragmatic work tracking advice do people have for tiny (1-4; 1 founder, 1-3 contractors) team sizes, analog or digital?
Context: I noticed a source of friction for my larger solo projects (1+ months) was a lack of structure and carrying the entire project in my head. Effective for hackathons but life is starting to force me into more context switching (getting older I guess). I've already refactored my work system to involve an analog weekly planner + weekly retro/plan ritual, heavier emphasis on digital calendar, adopting a two phase work philosophy (planning/grooming, task execution) often facilitated by pomodoro (5 minutes plan, 25 execute), and leaning on having a digital work tracking system.
I've taken a large bet on GitHub's ecosystem. Issues + "type:" labels let me create ticket types (spike, feature, bug) + "area:" labels (e.g. runtimes, category of concern (security, REST, client, ...), ...) allows me to gather and tag appropriate units of work. GitHub projects supports kanban boards and "filter by" or "slice by" features that are helpful. Pull Requests + Actions let me vet software additions. Issue/PR comment streams allow additional context capturing. Milestones & Releases let me plan larger epics and bundle my software. It's a robust digital system whose mental model makes sense in the context of delivering software.
I have an ambitious software project idea (multiplayer game software) that I'll eventually want to bring in a contractor or more. I want to stipulate some degree of interfacing with my system, even if it's just to capture the high level "this feature is handled by contractor A" and allow delegated delivery.
The points of friction so far have come from wrestling decision control with ai agents, and resisting the temptation to plan in too much detail too far into the future.
Given that brain dump, what advice might you have for me to help make for successful?
There’s an inbox view in github that shows me all the PRs I have to care about. It’s amazing.
Except I discovered that it just doesn’t include things sometimes. Items that show up in the “this month” filter disappear in the “last 3 months” filter for example.
This is one of those things where if it only works 98% of the time, it’s next to useless. I can’t just pretend a few PRs each week don’t exist.
One of the recent features I love the most is that they virtually the same color for symbol highlight and text selection. No visual feedback on double clicking a symbol to see if it is highlighted or not (and it sometimes isn't, because they managed to break that too!). Cannot highlight part of the word that happens to be a symbol either. What a lovely feature. It shows that they are not using the product much anymore.
It’s frustrating how they are doing all these pointless changes (in my opinion) and not implementing IPv6 support. I guess Github is only interested in AI now and making its UI terrible (because in my opinion it has only worsened 2020-onwards).
when they launched this in beta they asked what they should improve. most of the comments asked for making the agent sections removable. guess what they didn't change.
This is a stupid thing to latch on to but why is everything an “experience” now? It’s a fucking programming dashboard, not a three-star Michelin restaurant.
It's simply the industry term to describe the design of a user interaction with a system's interface. That's like complaining DC technicians refer to "blades" when it's just computers in a rack.
Would love to know what exactly is different today with this new dashboard, compared to when they first launched it as a preview? What did they already iterate on after getting user feedback? Would seem like the most intuitive parts to share in a blogpost about a feature moving from preview to be a default, but maybe not.
They've made / completely focused on the repos that you own and work on (and added some Copilot stuff I can't see because I don't use it), instead of the social media-like "Feed", which is now on a separate /feed page.
Opting out just makes the Feed appear on / again. I'd rather they just give you the option instead of doing the opt-out-until-we-remove-the-opt-out thing, the coward's way to change a default.
Im sorry but they need to make it more focused on the repos that you own and work on, this is not a social media site now matter how hard they try to drift in that direction.
A lot of people seem to be complaining, but the last iteration had Copilot at the top and then a "Feed" of what other people were doing.
This seems to push your issues and pull requests as the main items of the page, and that's significantly better.
Chances are slim that someone from GitHub will read this, but the text in this post (and other posts in the Changelog category) would be much more readable if there was more contrast between the text and the background (now it's dark grey text on black background).
This also depends on the screen you're using. Older LCD screens sometimes don't show colors/contrast that are super clear on newer displays. Not saying your comment is invalid, just something I've noticed.
It's great to add new features, but couldn't GitHub fix the essential ones first?
Just this week, I encountered the following problems:
- a diff showing "0 files changed" while there are many [1];
- suggested changes in a PR not rendering the original line [2];
- bug trackers not showing more than the 40th page [3].
Might seem nitpicky but it was just over the last week... I have a whole bunch of other bugs on my mind, and unfortunately, it's only gotten worse over the years. To the point where I almost don't care anymore.
[1] https://github.com/PokeAPI/sprites/pull/284#issuecomment-585...
[2] https://github.com/Delgan/loguru/pull/1516#discussion_r41268...
[3] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182925
I suspect it's the huge amount of requests they get and more so now with AI. Some estimates put traffic at 3-5x what it was just a year ago.
If GH.com is anything like GHE, the number of moving parts is staggering.
Ever since I discovered `gh`, I stopped going on the website itself. Stuff like this just makes it even more unlikely I'll return :-D
oh this is amazing. funny that they are self aware enough to talk about reducing context switching
who are 'they'?
This has noticeably worse info density compared to https://github.com/notifications, https://github.com/issues and https://github.com/pulls. Those old pages' list entries have padding-top: 8px and padding-bottom: 10px. This new dashboard's list entries have padding: 16px. Just why? It’s definitely more relevant though, overall a positive.
Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here. This is probably one of the few actual improvements github has made to UX in a while, normally when I visit I want to be looking for my things to do, not the social feed (though, I do like to explore the social feed sometimes, so, its not like its totally irrelevant, its just not the reason I go there).
Maybe that was the point, if its not front and center then nobody will use the social features.
Regardless, I think its hard to balance UI for normies and UI for techies, I think theres also a lot of brogrammers who might think they like being techies but their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency.
Personally, I have a negative almost visceral reaction when my tools change, because I learn my tools intimately and create expectations of where things will be- but this is also why I avoid tools which don’t have consistency in their UI too.
> Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here.
I get design/product people sometime that get all caught up in "we need to simplify" or there's not enough whitespace. Every time, the design/product person is not a user of the product, and the result is you ship their improvements, get blistering angry feedback (last time I even got the most prolific user and recommeder of our product calling me on my cell at 11pm) and revert.
> their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency
Exactly this. I think is speaks more to how frequently the designer uses the product versus actual users, and they don't understand the difference between UX for casual/infrequent users and people who spend all day in the product.
> I’m surprised at the negativity here
I’m not at all. People around here love to hate GitHub, and think any change to a product or design is incredibly regressive. These to combine and people lose their minds.
Becuse the designers got bigger monitors and need "space to breath" when presenting the design. It's not like they work much with these empty lists
Sidebar topic: (analog or digital) Work Tracking Systems for solo/tiny team sizes.
Central Question: What pragmatic work tracking advice do people have for tiny (1-4; 1 founder, 1-3 contractors) team sizes, analog or digital?
Context: I noticed a source of friction for my larger solo projects (1+ months) was a lack of structure and carrying the entire project in my head. Effective for hackathons but life is starting to force me into more context switching (getting older I guess). I've already refactored my work system to involve an analog weekly planner + weekly retro/plan ritual, heavier emphasis on digital calendar, adopting a two phase work philosophy (planning/grooming, task execution) often facilitated by pomodoro (5 minutes plan, 25 execute), and leaning on having a digital work tracking system.
I've taken a large bet on GitHub's ecosystem. Issues + "type:" labels let me create ticket types (spike, feature, bug) + "area:" labels (e.g. runtimes, category of concern (security, REST, client, ...), ...) allows me to gather and tag appropriate units of work. GitHub projects supports kanban boards and "filter by" or "slice by" features that are helpful. Pull Requests + Actions let me vet software additions. Issue/PR comment streams allow additional context capturing. Milestones & Releases let me plan larger epics and bundle my software. It's a robust digital system whose mental model makes sense in the context of delivering software.
I have an ambitious software project idea (multiplayer game software) that I'll eventually want to bring in a contractor or more. I want to stipulate some degree of interfacing with my system, even if it's just to capture the high level "this feature is handled by contractor A" and allow delegated delivery.
The points of friction so far have come from wrestling decision control with ai agents, and resisting the temptation to plan in too much detail too far into the future.
Given that brain dump, what advice might you have for me to help make for successful?
There’s an inbox view in github that shows me all the PRs I have to care about. It’s amazing.
Except I discovered that it just doesn’t include things sometimes. Items that show up in the “this month” filter disappear in the “last 3 months” filter for example.
This is one of those things where if it only works 98% of the time, it’s next to useless. I can’t just pretend a few PRs each week don’t exist.
You can save custom filters to that page as well, if helpful.
Over the last four years, GitHub announcing a change or new feature has generally led to a worse experience, for me at least.
One of the recent features I love the most is that they virtually the same color for symbol highlight and text selection. No visual feedback on double clicking a symbol to see if it is highlighted or not (and it sometimes isn't, because they managed to break that too!). Cannot highlight part of the word that happens to be a symbol either. What a lovely feature. It shows that they are not using the product much anymore.
One excellent update that comes to mind is their updated code search (2023) which can be super helpful and respects a solid grammar.
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-code-s...
The new issues and PR search, and new listings UI is great improvement. More functionality and more dense UI showing more things.
Improvements to Projects have been really good. Personally, I find no need for external project management tools anymore.
The issues and projects team(s?) have been cooking.
Is this last update one of those worse experiences?
It’s frustrating how they are doing all these pointless changes (in my opinion) and not implementing IPv6 support. I guess Github is only interested in AI now and making its UI terrible (because in my opinion it has only worsened 2020-onwards).
In the opinion of many, pointless stuff includes IPv6. Current system works for end-users. They get almost no direct benefit from IPv6.
End users are not the only relevant party, this attitude is short sighted.
What's the relevant party that is having a bad experience due to lack of IPv6?
I'm so happy to be working in Forgejo now. Goodbye GitHub.
Github seems to get slower and slower, while Forgejo running on my $5 VPS lets me fly through repos and files instantly.
Do you have CI on that?
Just a note: if anyone wants the old-school experience, https://github.com/dashboard-feed works fine for now.
Everything, including my Dutch textbook website for some reason, is vibecoded now.
Could you be more specific?
It's cheap and price matters more than UX.
when they launched this in beta they asked what they should improve. most of the comments asked for making the agent sections removable. guess what they didn't change.
Funnily enough, the first thing I did when I logged in and saw it this morning was remove the agents nonsense with an AdGuard rule.
Github has a dashboard?
This is a stupid thing to latch on to but why is everything an “experience” now? It’s a fucking programming dashboard, not a three-star Michelin restaurant.
It's simply the industry term to describe the design of a user interaction with a system's interface. That's like complaining DC technicians refer to "blades" when it's just computers in a rack.
You do experience it when using it. What HN does the most is complaint exactly about the experience.
Would love to know what exactly is different today with this new dashboard, compared to when they first launched it as a preview? What did they already iterate on after getting user feedback? Would seem like the most intuitive parts to share in a blogpost about a feature moving from preview to be a default, but maybe not.
They've made / completely focused on the repos that you own and work on (and added some Copilot stuff I can't see because I don't use it), instead of the social media-like "Feed", which is now on a separate /feed page.
Opting out just makes the Feed appear on / again. I'd rather they just give you the option instead of doing the opt-out-until-we-remove-the-opt-out thing, the coward's way to change a default.
That sounds like what this new dashboard experience is in general, not how it changed between when I first tried it during "preview", and now.
Or are you saying that all those things are new in the "new dashboard", compared to how that was initially when they launched the preview?
GitHub has a dashboard?
It changed?
TIL
GitHub’s UI is dreadful now.
Thank you. Now revert whatever it is that makes org mode files not render since ~40h.
yeah just put copilot as the first item on the home page and call it improved ui
can you smell the slop?
Im sorry but they need to make it more focused on the repos that you own and work on, this is not a social media site now matter how hard they try to drift in that direction.
it's still so garbage though.. on a 4K display:
- only half the sidebar is being used, by the "top repositories" section
- i have my own agent and want copilot purged from view completely rather than being the first central item of the dashboard
- why is the changelog taking up 1/4 of the screen? move it to the navbar as a popover
- the content doesn't go full width so i'm losing a column or two worth of content
PRs and issues sections are the least worst parts of the dashboard and they're still worse than just using /notifications as a dashboard.
completely worthless.