
They redesigned PubMed - dredmorbius
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/they-redesigned-pubmed-beloved-website-it-hasn-t-gone-over-well
======
kccqzy
Meh. Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users. It's
pretty unavoidable. Unless there are actual, real, usability issues or feature
reductions in the new UI, what typically happens is that after a few weeks of
complaining, most people just get used to it. If your product is important
enough, you can even get away with some usability issues or feature cuts—users
will use your product _in spite of_ those feature cuts.

A recent UI redesign that wasn't very well received is Google's code search
redesign. Compare, e.g. the same page on the old one[0] and the new one[1]. It
looks jarring at first sight if you're used to the old one, but ultimately
people just need to accept it and move on.

[0]:
[https://codesearch.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/bli...](https://codesearch.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/forms/html_input_element.h)

[1]:
[https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:t...](https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/forms/html_input_element.h)

~~~
jimmaswell
Redesigns should never, ever happen unless absolutely necessary. They're
basically never worth it and almost always worse than before.

~~~
jacobolus
In particular, the people doing the redesign often seem to not understand what
made the first design successful/effective, and senselessly wreck parts
without even realizing. I’m not sure if this is because they understand the
problem less than the original designers, the institutional incentives are set
up poorly to encourage high quality work, increased system complexity /
technical debt is harder to work around, institutional complexity makes it
harder for competent people to be in position to make the decisions, the
original successes were partly down to luck and reversion to the mean dooms
follow-ups to mediocrity, recent UI fashions are generically user hostile, or
what... but whatever it is, it’s very frustrating.

And that’s not even mentioning the inevitable bugs and glitches.

There’s probably some selection bias involved too. Those products and
redesigns which are amazing and wonderful get used, but nobody thinks too hard
about all the ways in which they are better. On the other hand when redesigns
negatively affect customers, the bad experience is unpleasantly memorable.

~~~
will_pseudonym
It's like rewriting a codebase. There's so much tacit understanding of the
actual problem inherent in a living design/codebase. All that nuance gets
obliterated because someone got a bee in their bonnet about better
code/cleaner design.

------
ejstronge
The new PubMed interface is definitely ‘prettier’ (more white space, mostly),
but the old interface was packed with information that helped me quickly
decide whether to read an article.

These sorts of applications should cater to experts who use them daily vs.
design standards du jour or new users, IMO. /rant

~~~
glenstein
Right. There's a huge value to information density, at least with certain
kinds of subjects. That's been completely lost with modern design that
emphasizes smooth edges and whitespace.

~~~
IgniteTheSun
Also, it seems like modern web designs (templates?) require a picture for
every entry. How many bulleted lists of titles/links do you see on web pages
anymore? Now each bullet point would be a complete entry with a picture and
the title requiring lots of scrolling.

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Ice_cream_suit
The new interface is dumbed down and has removed significant amount of
content.

The original interface was excellent for the user community of experts.

It appears to have been designed by a third-rate UX designer for the average
dummy, with no thought to what a professional user needs.

See: Dumbed down :
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)

Original:
[https://pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](https://pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)

~~~
jarym
My relatively recent pet peeve has been ‘UX designers’ (in quotes because I
respect the discipline and the many competent practitioners but refer here to
the charlatans) that push their narrowly defined views of ‘form’, ‘simplicity’
or ‘minimalism’ to the extent that the end result compromises the essential
functionality required by a user base.

I cannot wait for these people to leave the industry and hopefully take their
dogma with them. They’re the rebirth of the same mindset that led to the
‘eyeballs are all that matter’ era of the web in the early 90s.

~~~
friendlybus
I agree with your complaints, but would like to save 'form' 'simplicity' and
'minimalism' from the heaping tire fire that is the pubmed changes.

Apple's design philosophy takes good parts of those three concepts and
implements them well. Moving around essential functionality can be required in
specific cases.

Maximalism can be just as poorly made.

------
masswerk
> "Others offered a more nuanced take, noting that nearly every redesign of a
> popular website is initially criticized before people learn to live with
> it."

For a bit of computer history, while it may sound quite far fetched nowadays,
there were actually times when relaunches were generally welcomed and user
numbers were expected to double rather than dropping. (Well, this was before
UX.)

~~~
catmanjan
Do you have any insight into why this is no longer the case?

~~~
masswerk
My guess is, it's about marketing thinking and rather defensive thinking in
terms of consistency and world building. On the latter: We may assume that any
virtual application/appliance should be rather aggressive in terms of world
building in order to facilitate a comprehensive and consistent presentation
(this is what Apple once was great in). When we migrated from terms like
usability, screen design and interaction design to UX, this became subject to
rather defensive approaches (A/B testing, "best" [i.e. median] practices,
rather asking users instead of supporting them by own ideas, etc – arguably
you can't manufacture meaning and aesthetics just on popular vote). Also, I'm
not seeing much of a particular willingness to discuss, why prominent
relaunches keep failing for years. Rather, there's now this myth of users
always rejecting new designs at first. (As it turns out, in practices, either
the old design returns - e.g., the infamous Ars Technica relaunch – or users
won't return. And then, it's time for the next relaunch, usually with similar
results.)

Edit: As an example, I suppose none of the much beloved and personality
defining original Macintosh icons by Susan Kare could have come out of a
modern UX work flow, nor the use of the Norwegian landmark sign as the marker
of the command key. Or, where there any users that rejected the OS X Tiger and
Snow Leopard UI, which applied quite radical changes to the previous Aqua UI?

~~~
jimbob45
Why are marketers allowed in the design department ever? I've never seen a
design that made me think, "I sure am glad marketing was involved in this!".

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because the relationship between the visitor and the site is now exploitative.
Marketing is there to ensure they can turn you into money. The site is just a
lure, so it's built around the needs of the fisherman.

------
superkuh
This isn't the first time this has happened with PubMed. When they first
introduced their javascript application version years ago (the old site now)
it wouldn't even show text of abstracts without JS. But eventually they made
it so the text was always there, just badly styled without JS on.

The same thing happened with the recent SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
redesign ([https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/)).
Initially they planned to only have the very heavy SPA but after a few months
of comments and complaints the team made a really excellent "basic HTML"
fallback,
[https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/core](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/core) .

No doubt PubMed will implement a similar full featured fallback to sane HTML
if they want to remain relevant to researchers.

~~~
madars
At the same time ePrint [https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/)
is peak web design: simple, fast, functional.

~~~
pbourke
That site is wonderful. Even the “Complete contents” page, which appears to
load the entire archive in one request, is snappy on my iPhone.

------
btrettel
Of the US government science databases that I've seen, OSTI seems to have the
best interface: [https://www.osti.gov/](https://www.osti.gov/)

Good search, no JS required, loads fast, and looks modern for those who care.
You can even export the results of a search to a CSV spreadsheet.

~~~
cycomanic
I agree that is excellent.

------
Gatsky
Beloved? The first time I used the ‘old’ pubmed 15 years ago I remember
thinking it really, really sucked. The weird drop down export options, clunky
irrelevant filters on the main page but having to click through multiple pages
just to apply a reasonable filter, unsophisticated search etc. And it still
objectively sucked 15 years later, there was just no other option. To me the
new pubmed is obviously better. It pisses me off that some fool with low
neuroplasticity gets attention by trashing it on twitter, and ‘Science’ writes
a click baity article about it. Shameful behaviour if you ask me. If anyone on
HN was involved with the redesign, thank you, you did a great job.

~~~
fhsm
The previous design was not 15 years old [1]. If you want to push back 15
years you’d have been under the influence of the (Yahoo) Toolbar [2]. The
toolbar then, the Google+ whitespace now, NLM is of the times but with a
governmental handicap on timeliness.

[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign....](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html)

[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd05/nd05_toolbar.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd05/nd05_toolbar.html)

------
vikramkr
The new pubmed is fine. I've been using it nearly daily for a few years, so
from well before the redesign, and it does the job it needs to do. You're
going to get outsized backlash if you make any change with how non-tech-savvy
and conserved the biomedical research community is. The new version looks
nicer and seems to do a better job of searching articles using citations you
copy (forgot which Twitter user pointed that out). It's perfectly fine amd
this is really the only article I can find about this supposed backlash - a
few tweets does not signify community outrage when most researchers are
probably not on Twitter and are currently spending their time panicking about
the impact nonessential research shutdowns are going to have on their career
goals

~~~
Ididntdothis
"non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is"

They do tech and know it, just a different kind.

~~~
vikramkr
The tech we know in general isn't the tech this site thinks of when it says
tech. Set up a qPCR run? Yes we got that. Anything information tech related?
Ehh, not so much

~~~
IgniteTheSun
We had thousands of years of technology before computational devices came
along.

For example, there was a whole range of technology encompassed in the
transition from rubbing 2 sticks together to start a fire to pocket size
lighters.

The terms "developing new technologies" can be heard in the seminars in fields
having nothing to do with computers, programming, or the internet. One would
need a good background in calculus, partial differential equations, etc. to
understand many of the talks.

\---- edit: typo - replaced "we" with "with"

------
efiecho
I think another great example of a failed redesign is Internet Archive. The
old design was organized, easy to use and perfect for research on a PC like
most would use when browsing this site. The new design is a "mobile first"
disaster, unorganized with infinite scrolling that feels like your are
aimlessly scrolling pictures on Instagram or Facebook.

I love the content on Internet Archive, but the new site has been a pain to
use from day one.

------
cycomanic
I think this is really just the typical "it doesn't look/work exactly how I'm
used to". Every time I have used pubmed in the past (I generally use othe
databases for search) I thought how antiquated it looked and how cumbersome it
was to use. At least the new website has a mobile interface that alone is a
huge step forward.

~~~
zhdc1
The redesign also looks nice.

------
daenz
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very
angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

------
Causality1
Change for the sake of change is societal cancer. You can thank it for the
loss of your phone's 3.5mm jack and the fact it's nearly impossible to find a
gif on Google image search because it only returns video results.

------
MattGaiser
This seems like a better than average redesign.

They aren't shuffling everything (Facebook), making it slow and laggy
(Reddit), making constant stupid changes (Quora), or throwing out features.

~~~
troughway
What is the state of Quora these days? Especially after the pandemic hit, how
many employees do they still have and how many did the furlough/fire?

I'm genuinely asking, because how the fuck does that site make any money?

~~~
MattGaiser
The pandemic doesn't seem to have changed much at Quora yet.

There are a lot of glitches (for weeks the answer button in a request to
answer in notifications returned a 500 error), lots of trolls, lots of spammy
questions, and the occasional decent piece of writing. The usual. I still
don't think they have a test suite simply because they keep changing every
little thing.

Quora makes money on advertising. A lot of the answers are actually paid
adverts which are them promoted into your feed. Read closely, as often in
those top 5 lists is the company that paid for the list to be written. So many
of the top 5 to do travel answers were sponsored and promoted.

~~~
troughway
Ah, thank you! I had no idea that's what they did, as most of the Q&A I come
across are from first-hand sources, usually regarding some
event/incident/thing that occurred.

------
JackFr
Shout out to my people at the Lister Hill Center (Bldg 38A)!

I used to work at NCBI when I was graduate student at UMD, more than 25 years
ago. Pub Med was just being invented. There was a thing called Medline (which
had been a replacement to a thing called Medlars).

The guy I worked for was an MD/PhD (math) who was publishing papers on
document retrieval and natural language search. Absolutely brilliant man.
There was (and I’m sure there still is) a tremendous group of great scientists
there. It was mind blowing work for a kid right out of college.

Two things that came out when I was there
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(biotechnology)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_\(biotechnology\))
and
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spouge%27s_approximation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spouge%27s_approximation)
. The environment there, and how much the researchers loved there jobs almost
made it seem like getting a PhD could be worth it.

(That being said I imagine the staff researchers are not the people doing the
Web UX.)

------
x3blah
What if PubMed had something like Google's "I'm feeling lucky"? What if we
could explore PubMed by selecting a random PubMed URL instead of searching?
This script generates a random PubMed URL. To do this we need to know the
maximum PMID number in the PubMed database. The current max is included in the
script and will be saved in a 9-byte file named "max-PMID" when the script is
run. If run with the argument "update" it will search for a newer max PMID. If
a newer max PMID is found, the script updates the number in the max-PMID file
and in the script itself. An alternative is to use the ftp server[1] to find
the max PMID; I noticed the latest ftp update was missing new PMID's caught by
this script. If run without any arguments it selects a random PMID between 1
and the max and outputs a URL. uses socat, GNU sed and requires a fifo named
"1.fifo" 1\. ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/updatefiles/

    
    
           #!/bin/sh
           test -s max-PMID||echo 32446294 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;x=$((x-1));h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
           test ${#x} -eq 8||exec echo weird max-PMID;sed -i "/test/s/echo [0-9]\{8\} /echo $x /" $0;
           case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
           (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;' >max-PMID)&
           y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|; 
           $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 >1.fifo 2>/dev/null;
           ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$x 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

~~~
x3blah
Improved

    
    
       #/bin/sh
       test -s max-PMID||echo 32449615 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
       test ${#x} -eq 8||rm max-PMID;sed -i "s/[0-9]\{8\}/$x/" $0;
       case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
       (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed -n 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;wmax-PMID')&
       y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|; 
       $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 2>/dev/null|grep -o '<title>[^<]*' >1.fifo;
       ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$((x-1)) 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

------
cmrx64
I am completely blown away that they edited the stock photo to actually
contain the new page in question. So many lazy "generic computer screen"
images grace news articles about specific technologies.

------
Grollin
Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you
did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free
to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

\- A clear and easy to read interface \- Additional information on articles
(citations counts, journal scores…) \- A pin function to avoid opening 1,000
tabs \- The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think in the chat so we can improve it!

------
Grollin
Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you
did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free
to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

\- A clear and easy to read interface \- Additional information on articles
(citations counts, journal scores…) \- A pin function to avoid opening 1,000
tabs \- The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think!

------
Dumblydorr
I recall going through grad school, the only legitimate peer review according
to one professor was pubmed. I tried using google scholar and she told me it
was invalid, I HAD to use pubmed. The issue is pubmed is much less easy to
comb through, the site itself is very basic and unintuitive, and ultimately
both searches yielded the same results except that google scholar found one
extra article.

~~~
folmar
She was right, Google Scholar is great for discovery but poor for reference,
it accepts a lot of non-reviewed stuff.

------
Quanttek
tbh, I find the PMC redesign a lot worse. e.g.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204679/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204679/)

It uses screen real estate well but it feels weird to read from top left to
the bottom right of your screen before you scroll. This makes it much harder
to skim papers

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llacb47
In the same line of thought, I miss the old time.gov.

------
it
What if some subset of the web were set up in such a way that websites could
be forked as easily as projects are forked on Github?

~~~
disposekinetics
We could all go back to styling the web ourselves. I think the main thing
stopping that is it would be difficult to deliver ads.

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shpongled
I'm still more annoyed by the recent Nature redesign. The new font on their
site is awful

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rsuelzer
From my mobile phone the new site is unbelievable fast. A huge improvement in
speed and just a better feel overall.

I haven't played with desktop site yet.

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currymj
i just wish they could move it onto a different domain that doesn’t end with
“nih.gov”.

People can go on PubMed, find some bad article about 5G or fluoridation from a
dubious journal, and then send it around social media. The nih.gov TLD gives
the impression of official sanction to all kinds of garbage.

------
PanosJee
Use Causaly.com

