Top all-time · #267
Luke Wroblewski
Personal blog · lukew.comdesignweb
Luke Wroblewski writes LukeW | Digital Product Design + Strategy, a personal blog at lukew.com about design and web. Since 2007, 178 different Hacker News readers have linked it 213 times, most often “How Twitter increased conversion rate to 29% by adding 1 extra step.”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Luke Wroblewski's Functioning Form blog for form design, mobile-first and gradual engagement ideas, and his UX test results. Several commenters cite his posts as the reference on those topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
LukeW Ideation + Design provides resources for mobile and Web product design and strategy including presentations, workshops, articles, books and more on usability, interaction design and visual design.
Most-linked posts?
- How Twitter increased conversion rate to 29% by adding 1 extra step.8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2010-06-16
- /ff/6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2007-10-12
- Touch Gesture Reference Guide4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-04-20
- The more features you add3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-20
- "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-02-25
- /ff/entry.asp?9333 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-09
- Responsive Design Patterns3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-03-14
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-10-07
- RESS: Responsive Design + Server Side Components3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-12
- Obvious Always Wins2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-03
What Hacker News says?
This is as close as we got trying to do it from the app itself: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1906 I absolutely agree that password managers could remember this stuff. Single-signon is pretty easy to identify and you could setup the relationship.
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?1906
on “Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple”Submitted Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort as a story · 535 points
HN discussionHere are some results from a test Luke Wroblewski did many years ago. The best performing option was where the buttons were left aligned. See: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571 But agreed, if you can test your designs with users then you should.
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?571
on “Fuckin' user interface design, I swear”Submitted "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40% as a story · 270 points
HN discussion> That's driven by screen size - there's simply not enough screen real estate on a phone to label every button with words. It does have a legit discoverability problem, which most folks in UX acknowledge but don't know how to fix, given other constraints of the media. Some of the most effective solutions to this I've seen require solutions beyond visual representation. They address the problem through dimensions ind…
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?1798
on “Google’s look, evolved”Submitted Amazon Prime members buy twice as much, don't compare on price as a story · 211 points
HN discussionTry a blog not built on client side tech: https://www.lukew.com - the page loads are insanely fast, just click around.
Comment linking /
on “Browsers are pretty good at loading pages”Submitted Responsive Design Patterns as a story · 190 points
HN discussionYikes. What's funny is the article writer is a product director at Google. Fix this Luke! http://www.lukew.com/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort”Submitted Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview as a story · 129 points
HN discussionThis article made me think about my usage of dropdowns on mobile, and presented a few alternatives that I'll probably reach for more often now. As far as people being so called experts I'm not sure you're going to find someone with much more experience than Luke: http://www.lukew.com/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort”Submitted How Twitter increased conversion rate to 29% by adding 1 extra step. as a story · 68 points
HN discussionAnother good observation on this by Luke Wroblewski. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?1945
on “The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work”Submitted The more features you add as a story · 60 points
HN discussionWe have been building MCP servers and this looks very good directionally. Fills a bunch of holes in the protocol and gives meaning to something that were kind of like placeholders. Being able to return UI to the client is fantastic and will make lots of things possible. We have been working on these kinds of things assuming that the clients would improve to meet us. https://lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?2122
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?2122
on “Apps SDK”Submitted Impact of Removing Registration: 250,000 posts as a story · 53 points
HN discussionhttps://www.lukew.com/resources/web_form_design.asp
Comment linking /resources/web_form_design.asp
on “Cleave.js – Format input text content when you are typing”Submitted They Make Apps' slider-based alternative to CAPTCHA as a story · 37 points
HN discussionYes. There's a strategy of "gradual engagement": http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1128 (HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774007 ) gives some specific ideas on implementing it - and some impressive results. Basically, don't require more info from the user than you need right now. An example is you can read HN/reddit without an account - but if you want to vote/submit/comment, you need an account (and that's…
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?1128
on “Show HN: I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind”Submitted Thoughts After a Week with Google Glass as a story · 31 points
HN discussion> Isn't Foundation already responsive? Yes. > Don't most websites built with Foundation's grid system automatically fit nicely on mobile devices? Yes, but responsive designs always means tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs will be different depending whether you're "desktop first" and scaling down or "mobile first" and scaling up. And of course, the framework can set a course on what to check and where to start from. Luk…
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?933
on “Zurb Launches Foundation 4”Submitted Microsoft attributes $80-$100 million dollars in revenue to a shade of blue as a story · 29 points
HN discussionYes, and it will radically change as the web stops being English / Latin alphabet dominated. Typography for Japanese characters is fascinating - three different languages almost, sitting in the same sentence, the cadence of language reflecting in the angles or spacing, the possibilities are an order of magnitude more complex than English - and an order of magnitude more rewarding. http://www.flickr.com/photos/esthet…
Comment linking /ff/entry.asp?111
on “Web Design is 95% Typography”Submitted Functioning Form - The Apple Store's Checkout Form Redesign as a story · 28 points
HN discussionYour site is still really fast compared with almost all ecommerce sites. I built the backend for a friend of mine's blog and I always use it as an example of how fast the web could be but yours might be a more impressive example: https://www.lukew.com
Comment linking /
on “The Baseline Costs of JavaScript Frameworks”Submitted On Twitter Acquiring Bagcheck... as a story · 20 points
HN discussionLuke W and I made a blog platform for him in an afternoon on a Saturday years ago. Works pretty well. They aren't hard to build IMHO and if you write it yourself it just does exactly what you want it to do: https://www.lukew.com
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: A simple blogging platform I built out of frustration with other tools”Submitted LukeW: Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms as a story · 10 points
HN discussionMeasuring the performance of a CDN isn't that interesting. This is about the fastest blog I have seen and it doesn't have a CDN in front of it: https://www.lukew.com
Comment linking /
on “Serving a high-performance blog solely from memory, using Rust”Submitted Apple's Proposed Multi-touch User Interface System as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
