Just logged into GitHub, freaked out when I saw the redesign, and came straight here to say exactly this. It's unnatural eye movement to look wide for platform navigation, then narrow for README/repository navigation. This is outright bad design.
There was nothing wrong with GitHub's UI before, it was probably the closest thing to "perfect" I'd ever encountered.
Alongside that incredibly irritating "navigate to code definition" popup, it feels GitHub has too many designers with too little to do, so they're desperately scrounging around for things to change to fill their day. Either that, or there's some monetization angle (ala the Reddit redesign) that we haven't seen yet.
This is exactly the same what I'm thinking about: what's the purpose to redesign something which was good and familiar with something which is totally unpleasant. On a large monitor you have to move not only your eyes, but your head from left to right, from top to down just to find the relevant information, which on the old github was on the right place. Too bad there isn't an option to revert to the old design.
It seems to me Github from the Microsoft acquisition is going into a wrong direction.
Genuinely curious here - isn't it better for eyes to move more? Can moving in unnatural way be a good thing considering most of the time they move naturally? Like a sort fo stretching.
I don't mean it's literally bad for your eyes - there may well be benefits to constantly shifting your gaze/focus/etc. I can't comment on that.
I'm talking about "natural" eye movement being a well-known design principle. This means that eyes very naturally follow a Z pattern that doesn't exceed the periphery of your focus. So if you load up a fresh page, your eyes will naturally look top left -> top right -> bottom left -> bottom right, bounded by your standard viewbox (which is about 800px-1200px wide at 96dpi and 1-2ft, the standard distance most people sit from their monitor). So you usually stick your most important information along that pattern. Anything outside this boundary requires an extra "look", which means a slight hesitation/delay on the part of the user. That's not to say the space is unusable, just that you put your most common/important features/information along this flow.
It's also not an ironclad rule, but it does work very well. When I went to the old GitHub, my eyes always followed the same pattern: repository name (top-left, to make sure I was on the right page), account (verifying that I'm logged in), branch, clone/download, then file list or more commonly, the README (bottom-left). It was a very quick, natural way to navigate a random GitHub page.
Now, I literally have to move my head to do this. The weighting also feels completely unbalanced, like there's too much information on the left it's all slanting in one direction.
I believe for eyesight it's important to change focus, i.e. the distance of the object you're looking to. Not sure if just moving your eyes help but looking up from the screen into the distance is certainly good for the eyes.
There was nothing wrong with GitHub's UI before, it was probably the closest thing to "perfect" I'd ever encountered.
Alongside that incredibly irritating "navigate to code definition" popup, it feels GitHub has too many designers with too little to do, so they're desperately scrounging around for things to change to fill their day. Either that, or there's some monetization angle (ala the Reddit redesign) that we haven't seen yet.