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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)?

#201

Post by exiguus »

https://www.bahn.de/ / https://www.webpagetest.org/result/250508_AiDc5H_8VR/ Huge functionality with minimum cognitive load. IMO a mix of google and yahoo. Also the Android/iOS app of bahn.de is very intresting.

Articles:

- Density and Audition: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usa...

- Density is Cultural: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/china-website-complexity/

- Conventions: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/breaking-web-conventions/

- Information per cm² https://www.nngroup.com/articles/designing-effective-infogra...

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

#203

Post by somat »

I vote blender.

High density can and often is done wrong, but it is often the hallmark of interfaces for professional users, an intricate tool designed to be used as quick as passable for hours on end, to accomplish this you try and reduce intermediate steps. this means putting everything up front, redundant panels(to do the same thing from different viewpoints), no overlap(why obscure information?) etc.

The end product usually ends up being intimidating as hell for new users. But is much more ergonomic for experienced ones.

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

#205

Post by somat »

jorvi wrote: post #144
thih9 wrote: post #33

Programs used by pro creatives. Some people regularly spend 8h/day using a single such product as their primary work tool. E.g. pro desktop versions of photo, print, video, sound, etc editing software usually feature good UX and high information density. One well known example of that is Blender - here is a chapter from their manual about its user interface: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/window_…

I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom). One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows. Meanwhi…

Did they?

I am only an occasional blender user, but I have been using it a long time. since 1.7

the main key binds I have always used have not changed. tab, g, r s, e, b, A, f, ctl-click to add points.

Are you telling me those are the industry standard keybinds (surprised pikachu face)

One thing I always felt blender did better than the "industry standard tools" was it's quick/natural workflow. I have not used Maya since collage in 2000 but back then it was very clunky compared to blender for quick vertex based editing. My theory is more that the "industry standard tools" caught up to blender. but by then blender had a bad reputation as being quirky, so the "big redesign" was more a press-release. Give it a menu bar make it dark mode and most importantly got to cure that bad-reputation so tell everyone it is completely different now.

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

#206

Post by flakiness »

chromy wrote: post #17

Look for tracing/profiling/binary analysis UIs: - https://superuser.com/questions/1117466/using-windows-perfor... - https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy - https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex 3D modeling / CAD software: - Blender/Rhino etc - Similar for audio you can search for 'DAWs' ( https://blog.landr.com/best-daw/ ) Many examples on https://x.com/usgraphics/media only some software. Not on the data side but can be usefu…

https://ui.perfetto.dev/ is also good in this line.

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

#207

Post by throwaway2037 » 

    > What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?
Ask that exact same question to someone from the AngloAmerican sphere and Japan/Korea. They will answer very differently. This is a widely studied cultural communication difference. Japan/Korea can handle incredibly dense communictation mediums, but AngloAmericans cannot. Neither is wrong, but they are both economically important cultural spheres.

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

#208

Post by nitwit005 »

Try doing a Google search for "Call center software" or "workforce scheduling software" and clicking images.

They have also been victimized by the designers wanting a ton of whitespace, but those are both spaces where the customers push back.

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

#209

Post by ashwinsundar »

danielvaughn wrote: post #25

I’ve been on a similar journey, and I haven’t found any good resources. Much of the low-density trend can be traced back to Tailwind. I love the library, but I do find it frustrating that pretty much all designers lean towards low-density by default. The problem is that it only works well for casual/consumer applications. Once you start building for professional, productivity-driven products, you need density. One sh…

How did Tailwind contribute to the low-density trend? I use it a lot and don't really find myself forced to create "low-density" sites based on any decision by the library-makers.

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

#210

Post by mrweasel »

MattSayar wrote: post #83
mrweasel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Bloomberg, the Bloomberg Terminal is also a good example of a really information dense interface. There is a few videos on YouTube where Bloomberg shows examples of how to use their terminals.

Like this one [0]. I don't understand most of it but I can appreciate how few clicks it takes to get the info you want [0] https://youtu.be/h0hYYIGryJ4?si=LkBtTVWyomvyEjlM&t=69

Yes, exactly. It probably makes more sense if you understand the terms used in the financial industry. Overall I'm just fascinated by the whole system, everything from the design language, the UI, the infrastructure and the keyboard.
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