Redesigning GitHub Repository Page
<i>&gt; If you are a programmer, you might be surprised but other people normally don’t like hierarchies. Nested structures are hard to grasp, remember, navigate, and grouping is very often non-intuitive. Nested tabs are one of the worst UI patterns out there.</i><p>GitHub is primarily a development tool, so it should be designed for developers. Hierarchies align very well with development tasks, so it&#x27;s natural to use them for development tools. That other people don&#x27;t grasp them is not relevant for GitHub.<p>Also, the three most common navigation tasks I do are &quot;go to the code&quot;, &quot;go to the issues&quot; and &quot;go to the pull requests.&quot; Those are also the first three tabs at the top of the hierarchy. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s an accident; I think the designers at GitHub designed the layout so that the most common tasks are on top and first. In other words, they designed GitHub like a tool, not a normal webpage.<p>With this redesign, I&#x27;m going to constantly have to find the &quot;Issues&quot; and &quot;Pull Requests&quot; tabs among a sea of others. That&#x27;s not good usability.<p>I&#x27;ve thought that maybe the markdownified README should be flipped up on top, but even that I think is counter-productive. When I&#x27;m working with a GitHub project, I commonly want to load up the page and navigate to some files. If not, it&#x27;s usually not much scrolling to get down to the README. But READMEs can be quite long (which is a good thing), and it would sometimes be a pain to always scroll past them to get to the files. The better solution for that is a good project page.