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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)?

#292
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's it! Thanks!

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

#293

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…

Their X feed is fantastic: https://x.com/usgraphics

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

#294

I'm a rover driver / arm operator for Curiosity and we have several excellent tools that fit your description here at JPL. Chief among them, in my opinion, is RSVP Hyperdrive. See the 5th screenshot on https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/applications/us... . I'm also a developer on RSVP and have contributed bug fixes and features to Hyperdrive. I'm hopeful we can open-source it someday. (This is my opinion,…

This is incredibly cool -- thank you for sharing!

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize for them.

On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life.

You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's something utilitarian in its internal and external design. No flashy, no fancy.. 99% informational and low lag.

The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ

I've always assumed that making a fast and responsive website isn't a technical problem, but a social/political one.

It's easy to create a website where interactions simply fetch the necessary resources and update the DOM as required. But managers then insist on adding 20 trackers so every little click and interaction gets logged somewhere for analytics.

Or are frameworks REALLY that slow?

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

#298
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...

"AI" on landing pages is doing numbers of reps the old "seamless" and "effortless" tag-team could only dream of. I hate it.

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

#299
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…

One thing I like about TWS is that related widgets (candlestick chart, newsfeed, L2 table, etc.) can be easily linked or separated. For example I can link a chart and a newsfeed together and if I switch the chart to a specific stock the newsfeed will switch over as well. Another commenter has mentioned that this is a TOS feature as well.

Those widgets can be resized and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs with separate layout for each.

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

#300
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 particularly enjoy Rock Auto’s website as well.

Absolutely no BS. It dumps you right onto the list of car makes.

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