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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)?

#311
post #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!

You know, I just took another look at that screenshot and realized it's from a 2012 build. We have added input and output constantly since then... so it's a lot more information dense now lol... probably twice as much "stuff" on screen. I guess it could be considered cluttered now, but I'll take that any day over programs with poor feature discoverability.

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

#312
Ham radio is rife with information dense UIs, some good, many not so good. Most software is designed for power users and there is an expectation that new users will read the manual. e.g. WSJT-X, VOACAP: https://www.voacap.com/hf/

I made this UI for realtime ham radio signal spotting a couple of years ago, which was an interesting challenge in that regard: https://ft8.live

I used Ant Design and Deck.gl for this which are both quite good for building dense UIs and data visualisation platforms

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

#313
post #308
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This suggests having your front-end and design staff take Tufte's trainings would not be a bad investment.

Absolutely agree --- they are _amazing_ sessions, and if you can't make it, the books are highly recommended:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte

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

#315

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…

Another way of breaking this down, is UI that gets out of the way, and UI with a big ego.

So many SaaS business tools have ego-driven UI, where it's all about keeping you in the tool, increasing engagement, etc. The problem is that people buy business tools to improve their productivity, the best tool for a business is one that requires zero time to use and provides some value. You want to get in, get value, and get out as quickly as possible so you can move on to delivering value to your business.

Slack used to be good at this when it was just about IM, but then they became all about replacing other forms of communication... the problem is they weren't as good, some email does need to be email. Engagement went up, but "managing Slack" was a big time sink. My old company trialled Facebook Workplace, and probably because it was built with a social network mindset instead of a productivity tool mindset, it was an immediate time sink with very little value.

There are lots of examples of the flip side, UI that gets out of the way, but they're usually pretty boring.

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

#316

I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but these two come to mind: - Mixx: https://mixxx.org/screenshots/ - darktable: https://www.darktable.org/about/screenshots/

Mixxx is fantastic software. Definitely better than the supposed "industry-standard" Rekordbox.

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

#317

I don't know if any of these are good, but there are 100s (1000s?) of examples of high density UIs here https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues?q=label%3Agallery So you don't have to dig, 3 examples https://camo.githubusercontent.com/6f62b5ca8579543a1f59eceed... https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com/13691253/4... https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com/14961870/4...

Links 3rd and 4th don't work. Also, the second one, holy shit it has to be the densest imgui UI I've seen.
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