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How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

blog.gingerbeardman.com

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#41

Java called. Wants its GridBagLayout back. It says it might be patented and can probably litigate.

OP here. SwiftUI has it too. Ideal to implement the results. But they're not great for finding the solution as they are magnitudes slower than spreadsheet manipulation.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#42

Java called. Wants its GridBagLayout back. It says it might be patented and can probably litigate.

OP here. SwiftUI has it too. Ideal to implement the results. But they're not great for finding the solution as they are magnitudes slower than spreadsheet manipulation.

Hi! Nice article, tbh.

I draw my UIs on paper and just calculate the cells and merges, then code it. I'm a pen and paper addict when designing software (ideas, algorithms, UI).

It's not the fastest, but the most focused mode for me.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#43

For me a much better approach for working on wireframes, which I'd say this post is about, is Figma or Penpot.

OP here. I love Penpot (Figma is OK but pretty lacking/stagnant in terms of core tools). And whilst they are great for wireframes you have to have a lot of self control to keep it simple, and of course there's setup required to even get going. By that time I've already finished in my spreadsheet.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#44

I’ve never used spreadsheets for prototyping but I’ve used slides. Those have a grid system too – you just need to toggle its visibility and enable “snap to grid.”

OP here. Yes indeed! I mention the use of Keynote in the blog post. For me, it’s good but perhaps too high fidelity for my particular use case of figuring/carving out sections of the screen.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#45
A big problem with modern interfaces is that they are too dynamic, with widgets appearing and disappearing or changing size, etc. Compare that with the old DOS console or Windows 9x (and later too) where the layout was fixed and inactive widgets were grayed out. There's an increased cognitive load from having to find where the information is displayed. On mobile I often press the wrong button because the UI decided in a split second to change the number of buttons in a row and move what's below my finger.

A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#46
post #26

Monodraw is also good for UI design. The minimal-looking rendering of the interface gets right to the core of how the thing is supposed to work. Really it’s just the spreadsheet method taken to its logical end.

OP here. Monodraw is cool, similarly I also really like Karo Graph and Square Sketch. But the thing those are all missing compared with a spreadsheet is the ability to quickly and easily adjust the working grid—even in the middle of your content—by adding and removing rows/columns.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. SwiftUI has it too. Ideal to implement the results. But they're not great for finding the solution as they are magnitudes slower than spreadsheet manipulation.

Hi! Nice article, tbh. I draw my UIs on paper and just calculate the cells and merges, then code it. I'm a pen and paper addict when designing software (ideas, algorithms, UI). It's not the fastest, but the most focused mode for me.

That gives me an idea, maybe I can code a spreadsheet to gridcode tool. :)

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#48
post #28
post #20

~2008 a friend at a consulting co. showed me how they drafted UIs in Excel. Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design. If you'd like to try it it's free: https://uxtly.com

Hi, I am interested in this tool but I could not even grasp how does it trying to solve the problem as the video is buffering each second. I watch youtube too so it is not my connection I assume

Same happens here.

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#49
Modern UI design is such a colossal nightmare of inconsistent command lists, hidden menus, changing interface behavior, duplicative functionality... My understanding is that many developers now engage in "telemetry-based design" that work to redesign interfaces around user behavior, leading to such excellent decisions as

- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"

- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen

- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on

And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.

Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.

I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?

Re: How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet

#50

Irrelevant but spreadsheets have always struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces of software that we use. Automatically updating calculations, programming logic complex anough for most ERPs, using it is a database, easy organisation of data, graphs -- it has it all. From both a user and developer perspective, they are one of the most diverse tools on a computer. MS may make terrible software sometimes, but damn…

Spreadsheets are one of the ugliest pieces of software that we use. Pretty much all of the paradigms spreadsheets enforce would be considered abhorrent in any other context. Excel needs five hundred megabytes of memory just to load a blank sheet. Vendor lock-in is just tolerated as a fact of life, as is the lack of a real way to integrate with version control, and a lack of human-readable source files. If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”, you would fire him on the spot, but that’s basically normal for an Excel sheet. There is not an ounce of elegance in MS Excel, and trying to integrate with PowerApps, PowerAutomate or PowerBI only makes things worse.
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