Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

211–220 of 392 posts

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

#211

apollo.io

I don't find this site to be particularly information-dense. There is a lot of scrolling needed just to extract a few sentences of info about what this site even is. Although the graphics and design are cool.

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

#212

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/

I am not here to shill for Google, but I cannot believe that Google doesn't have a special arrangement with McMaster to index all of their part numbers! The advertising potential is very good. As a related point, I am almost sure they have special handling for programming searches to prefer StackOverflow over other sources. A few times, SO.com has made some incredibly tiny change to their webpages that made them virtually invisible to Google. After some internal email exchanges, SO.com was "fixed", and again, dominated Google programming searches. (Of course, this was 2010s... long before the AI slop era!)

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

#213
I call it Trader UI vs VC UI. Traders want as much info jammed onto the screen as possible. VC backed companies use bootstrap, and want rounded corners on a pricing page with little actual information.

I have been working on Buckaroo, a table UI for dataframes that runs in jupyter notebooks. It's much more TraderUI, with sparkline size histograms, and decent baked in formatting for numeric columns.

https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo

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

#214
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…

I like that the U.S. Graphics Company link has a bunch of TUI examples.

htop came to mind.

https://htop.dev/

Here's a gallery of a bunch of TUI apps.

https://www.linuxlinks.com/100-awesome-must-have-tui-linux-a...

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

#216

SOunds almost like the opposite sides of the spectrum. With some exceptions and edge cases (like trading or aviation where you have to see a lot of information at once, density is the product in itself) I argue that by "good" UI most UI users really mean "well structured and carefully prioritized information that doesn't overwhelm you" (aka "low information density"). It is really hard to find good UI in that sense.…

That's a fair point, and my own earlier example (newspaper-like layout for online news) links through to the source "lite" article ... which is laid out with ample whitespace and no distractions.

Which contrasts to the typical online news article which is littered with advertisements and "Related" links (which are not in fact related), as well as multiple calls-to-action for newsletters, registrations, donations, and all the rest (WaPo, NPR, PBS, and others all come to mind). Not to mention autoplay video and audio, dickbars, etc., etc.

My front page is information dense. Its job is to convey what current breaking news is. It is text-only, partly because incorporating images from upstream is complicated, but mostly because those images convey no useful information.

"Information appropriate" is probably a better overall term, where for survey or multiple-element presentation should have many discrete items, but where detailed presentation focuses on one and only one item, which can be read in depth without distraction.

That said, not having shit that moves in either case is a huge improvement over Web defaults these days.

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

#217
post #125

Any EMR (electronic medical record) would probably fit this description. For example Epic, the leading one in the US: https://www.emrsystems.net/epic-ehr-software/ Or Orbis, the leading one in Europe: (there's not many good screenshots of it online but this PDF has a few) https://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Kundeninfos/DE/09/2023/32261... There's a myriad of other ones as well, they all have similar UIs, with the primary…

My mom builds EMR workflows for a major hospital and my father and sister are doctors (both very tech savvy--my sister has a computational bio background for her Bachelor's prior to her MD).

None of them have anything good to say about Epic.

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

#218
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't care about SEO, Single-page Applications usually reach the same feeling? when the components are well designed, and clicking something just fetches the parameters for the components that are primarily loaded on the initial render. But usually the implementations are poor or there is additional bloat so we don't see them as fast.

So, SPAs are the communism of the web app world?

I have no idea what you mean.

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

#219

I call it Trader UI vs VC UI. Traders want as much info jammed onto the screen as possible. VC backed companies use bootstrap, and want rounded corners on a pricing page with little actual information. I have been working on Buckaroo, a table UI for dataframes that runs in jupyter notebooks. It's much more TraderUI, with sparkline size histograms, and decent baked in formatting for numeric columns. https://github.com…

Great work. Buckaroo looks very slick.

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

#220
I remain appreciative of Native Instruments' original Massive VST [0], which has a good balance of dedicated interaction surfaces and tabbing. More recently, I think the Bitwig DAW has become a great contender for UI clarity and density (its layout is very configurable) [1].

[0]: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...

[1]: https://www.bitwig.com/overview/

Post reply on HN