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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)?

#271

Post by saratogacx »

kccqzy wrote: post #147

The desktop version of Charles Schwab's expert trading platform, thinkorswim. Or TWS from Interactive Brokers. Basically these are trading platforms designed for day traders and the highest end of the retail investors market. These necessarily have to good high-information density UIs: imagine trading an option showing all strikes (SPX has hundreds of strikes), both calls and puts, and showing the option Greeks (delt…

I was thinking the same thing. I've used TOS for years (2010) and it is crammed with info while still being fairly easy to use. The fact that you can also group multiple UI elements to always show the same symbol (change one, they all follow) lets you go a bit nuts in the analysis dashboards you can make.

The TOS mobile app is also not too bad. A couple of years ago they tried to add some less data-dense info to the main screen and the they got a review riot which caused them to make the view optional and untouched sense then.

I've got a lot of respect for them being able to keep that UI stable for so long.

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

#273

Post by paddy_m »

czhu12 wrote: post #266
paddy_m wrote: post #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…

This is such a nice package, I've been wanting something like this forever. I can't believe how clunky it is to just browse data in a jupyter notebook, given that its entire purpose is for data exploration.

Thank you. I'm putting the finishing touches on auto cleaning which integrates with the low code UI. Should be out today

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by gwern »

WillAdams wrote: post #46
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/

There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory: - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage - the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast…

I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir (https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-the-w...) who worked there 2003-2005 (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-Carr...) and who writes:

> McMaster-Carr has a Systems department which handles internal software development, including the website. I actually worked on a lot of the front-end functionality (among other things) during my tenure there and we had 1 person who was essentially the UX lead (I'm sure the team / function has expanded since then). > > The design philosophy for the website was heavily influence by Edward Tufte and myself and several folks from my engineering team were enrolled in his course to familiarize ourselves with key concepts. > > When I interviewed with McMaster-Carr I distinctly remember a Director who told me about building the first version of the website himself and not realizing it would become "a real thing" one day. I cannot for the life of me remember his name, but he was a sharp guy and I'm sure he's off doing great things. We walked into work one Monday morning, and his desk was empty and his whiteboard said "poof".

Given the timing and his description of what he did, it seems unlikely any other McMaster-Carr insider would have been writing about it, and this has to be what you are remembering, if anything.

(And https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ seems useless here.)

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

#277

Post by PhilipRoman »

csomar wrote: post #139

If you are looking for a UI framework, checkout IBM Carbon: https://carbondesignsystem.com I used it to build a merge conflict tool: https://codeinput.com and while it required a much deeper understanding than just reading the docs (tons of bugs), it is by far the most comprehensive UI framework out there. Most UIs either lack lots of components or are made by a couple front-end/react/css guys. This inevitably means…

Lol, they managed to use the word "AI" 12 times in the landing page of an UI framework...

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

#279

Post by all2 »

eCa wrote: post #241

This is probably the most densely packed ui I have ever used[1] to rename photos from their EXIF data. It's not pretty, but I prefer this over a ten step wizard. [1] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/darkmode....

Reminds me of finviz's sorting/selection UI for stocks/funds.
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