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Baymard Institute
Company blog · baymard.com/blogdesignbusiness
Baymard Institute is the company blog at baymard.com, writing about design and business. Since 2008, 94 different Hacker News readers have linked it 115 times, most often “Readability: The Optimal Line Length”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
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Most-linked posts?
- Readability: The Optimal Line Length27 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2017-12-09
- Readability: How to achieve the optimal line length in web design17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2011-01-12
- Drop-down usability: when you should (and shouldn't) use them4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-13
- Redesigning the country selector2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-11-10
- /checkout-usability2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-01
- The Current State of Mobile UX2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-10
- Which Secure Site Seal Do People Trust? Results from randomized panel2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-15
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-19
What Hacker News says?
Wikipedia's style is almost perfect except for one thing that bugs me: the line width in desktop style is unlimited, meaning in a big window it can be hundreds of symbols long, which is pretty bad from the readability standpoint ( https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability ).
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia”Submitted Redesigning the country selector as a story · 192 points
HN discussionIt's been this way forever because it's not particularly difficult science and is extremely easy to test for so there are probably thousands of papers covering this. Here's a good summary by Baymard Institute[1]. Also WCAG recommends line length set to <80 characters too [2]. I'm not sure what else could make this more convincing or official. 1 - https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability 2 - https://www.w3.or…
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “How web bloat impacts users with slow devices”Submitted Always Use “Buttons” for Size Selection as a story · 118 points
HN discussionOne of the problems with Slack/Discord desktop clients is that the message area (center column) tends to be far too wide on HD monitors (1200px+), making it difficult to read[1] anything that hasn't been manually line-wrapped. [1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Writing one sentence per line”Submitted User Expectations: Create an Illusion of Space as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI see a lot of comments condemning this feature and saying it's ridiculous. However, you have to understand that people outside of the tech industry have a very different mental model of how computers work than the rest of us. One example of this is shown in a usability study by the Baymard Institute on top ecommerce checkout processes [1]. The goal of the study was to determine best practices for checkout usability…
Comment linking /checkout-usability
on “Establishing secure connection”Submitted Readability: The Optimal Line Length as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThe article isn't clear on it, but there have been studies ( http://baymard.com/blog/making-a-slow-site-appear-fast ) that show the perception of fast loading is actually more important than the real thing. Showing the user a "Loading..." graphic is the most common manifestation of this, but there are others. (Unfortunately, the original Forrester-Akamai study seems to be unavailable.)
Comment linking /blog/making-a-slow-site-appear-fast
on “We spent a week making Trello boards load fast”Submitted UX and the Kano Model as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> Because why insist in short names and 80 width character limit? Almost everyone have a screen that can fit hundreds of characters per line today. Yet, books don't work that way, even though we have the technology. Long lines aren't readable. There's a reason newspapers have columns. See eg https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing”Submitted Ways to Simplify 'Sign In' as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI do the same thing, although I wouldn't consider it random. I use to to keep track of where I am on the page. Highlighting really helps with poorly formatted pages, where the article is too wide to comfortably read and follow onto the next line [1]. [1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog”Submitted Readability: The Optimal Line Length as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt's probably in order to maintain an optimal character count ( https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability ) without the paragraph being too small.
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Examples of everything new in ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018”Submitted Accordion Style Checkouts – the Holy Grail of Checkout Usability? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionOn my desktop browser, the font shows ~100 characters per line, which is a bit more than what I've seen the recommended count be for ideal readability: http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “The Making of Lemmings”Submitted Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> dumbed down ??? Longer columns doesn't take higher intelligence, it just strains your eyes. http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability Have you ever seen a print edition of the NYT or WSJ?
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “300ms tap delay removed on Chrome for Android”Submitted Faceted Sorting – A New Method for Sorting Search Results as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you have done any typesetting, say for a book, you'd realize that there is a sweet spot between the font size and the number of characters in a line. This has changed little over the hundreds of years. I think some of that effect is what we're seeing on the screen here in this post. There is a lower limit though, if you set the line too small, you'll be scrolling very often as the other comments have pointed out.…
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Write thin to write fast”Submitted 9 Ways to Simplify 'Sign-Up' as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAt first I was skeptical, but this is great stuff. For example https://baymard.com/blog/autocomplete-design gives 13 subtle ways to make autocomplete better, and I agree with all of them.
Comment linking /blog/autocomplete-design
on “The Baymard Institute: An evidence-based trove of UX best practices”Submitted The Current State of Mobile UX as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://baymard.com/
Comment linking /
on “The Baymard Institute: An evidence-based trove of UX best practices”Submitted Readability: How to achieve the optimal line length in web design as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMore about optimal line lengths if you're curious. With line lengths that are too long, the user may have a hard time tracking back to the next line. Line lengths too narrow, the user's pacing and rhythm is thrown off. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
Comment linking /blog/line-length-readability
on “Rescuing vintage arcade video games from an abandoned ship (2016)”Submitted Account 'Sign Up': Ask to Confirm E-mail, Not Password - Baymard Institute as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI still think there's a lot of subtle UX innovation going around. You just need to know where to look. Some more well known sites include: - Medium - Atlas Obscura - Techcrunch - New York Times (visual / interactive story articles) - https://baymard.com/research - ecommerce UX research Not all UX design content mediums have been invented yet, there's billions of permutations, and different content requirements. Diff…
Comment linking /research
on “Why do all websites look the same?”Submitted A Simple Strategy for Start-Ups to Kick Fortune-500-Butt as a story · 4 points
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