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Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

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Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#161

Post by dewey »

alnwlsn wrote: post #115
squiggy22 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much additional traffic, links, seo benefit and general brand awareness this site has generated simply off doing things to this standard. A fly wheel of benefits.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among the results. While the url to that product is just https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/

If you have a lot of product pages (millions) it can make sense to not have all of them indexed by a search engine. If you have pages that are more profitable and might hit more keywords than some very specific product SKU it makes sense to index these primarily.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#162

Post by alnwlsn »

spookie wrote: post #119
alnwlsn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among the results. While the url to that product is just https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/

"Black oxide screw" on the other hand appears. Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.

Maybe, but I never seem to have trouble searching for even further incomprehensible part numbers on other items. Give me a DigiKey part number like "WM7610CT-ND" and google finds it first thing. Digikey is also the first result for the manufacturer part number "0533980671".

For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of their catalog.

At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable - they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers, with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me to check the McMaster site first.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#164

Post by ghostly_s »

alnwlsn wrote: post #100
abound wrote: post #21

I didn't see anyone mention the McMaster-Carr website [1]. It may not be the "densest" out there, but it's clean, functional, and nicely presents a lot of information at once. [1] https://www.mcmaster.com/

I'm going to go against the crowd and say that I prefer DigiKey and Mouser's sites over McMaster. The filter/apply pattern they use when trying to narrow things down is a lot quicker than waiting for Mcmaster's auto updating window. Usually, when I'm looking for something, it's not for an exact specific item, but to know what options are even there in the first place. Selecting ranges of things in McMaster has always…

McMaster serves a different market than Digikey/Mouser...

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#165

Post by ChiperSoft »

pier25 wrote: post #137
jedberg wrote: post #81

https://old.reddit.com We used to have an even denser display, but they sadly got rid of it. It was the original reddit mobile interface (served as a webpage, not an app). There is a screenshot on this blog post (by one of the guys who worked on it): https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/

This. I still use old reddit with RES. It's a bit ugly but perfectly functional. Tried the newer web versions a couple of times over the years and just hate the whole experience. A couple of years ago I considered building a web client for Reddit but then the whole API thing happened. Maybe it's time to build a new Reddit? :)

> Maybe it's time to build a new Reddit? :)

Lemmy is serving my former reddit needs quite well.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#166

Post by divbzero »

seanhunter wrote: post #6

Bloomberg is the obvious example. It is an extremely well-designed and effective high-information density UI designed to be very efficient to use but requiring some skills to get the most out of it.

Bloomberg Terminal was the first example that came to mind for me too:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bloomberg_Terminal_M...

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#168

Post by postalcoder »

dang wrote: post #149
postalcoder wrote: post #145

I'm working on a Hacker News front page with the idea of UI density as a foundational concept. https://hcker.news I haven't did a Show HN yet but I'd love to get some feedback on it first. It's got a lot of configurable views and can be made extremely dense (dense mode on + columns: auto). The aesthetic itself was made to deviate as little from the HN frontpage as possible. It's got a lot of filtering knick knacks li…

How do you decide which stories to include in the list for a given day, and how to rank them?

In timeline mode, it's just a pure top 10/20/50/100 stories by points (or comments, if chosen) for each day (in your time zone). The stories are presented in chronological order in which they were submitted (top is newest).

The timeline view can get wonky when it's like 12AM-2AM when there are relatively few stories in "today".

  Misc:
  1) it doesn't filter out flagged stories
  2) second-chance pooled items, should they rise in ranks, will be shown on the day the item was originally submitted, not the day it got popular.
I may do to a "rising" type of view but I'm curious about what others want to see first.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#170

Post by yencabulator »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #105

Google now forces designers to make huge interfaces on mobile. Tap targets smaller than 54px get a “tap target too small” penalty applied to the sites usability score. This score in turn can hurt your rankings for mobile searches. Which can in turn damage your business. So what are we to do?

The 48x48px touch target is estimated to be ~9mm. That's tiny for touching by finger, since you can't see through your finger to aim (styluses could do it).

For mobile, look for UX patterns that don't hinge on my big thumb hitting a tiny patch of screen. For example, gestures like swipe to either side to expose actions for item.

Most of the things talked about in this thread are not mobile UIs, and are not limited by such concerns.

And finally, information density can be separate from available action density.

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