11–20 of 445 posts
Too often I see UX issues blamed on visual choices — the whole everything must be flat movement of 2013-2018 is one example — when there are deeper issues that can't be extracted into a pithy recommendation.
That aside, the Freshbooks redesign last year pushed me to switch to QuickBooks for exactly this reason. The new design had the stereotypical "modern app" design, but every common task required 5x more time than before.
For example, just to change the category of an expense you have to 1) click on the expense, wait for the detail page to load, 2) click on the category, 3) click "Change Category" and wait for the dropdown to load, 4) click on the new category, wait for it to apply, 5) click "Save", 6) click "Back to expenses." And every interaction takes a second or two to register, so imagine a delay between every step. Now imagine doing this 50 times every month when you're doing bookkeeping.
... In the previous version this took two clicks: 1) In the expense listing screen, click on the category, a drop down instantly appears, 2) click on the new category, it instantly applies.
They also took away the feature to add an accountant to your account. Imagine if GitHub took away the option to add "member" users.
Hallelujah. It's not just enterprise apps, either. I've seen more than a few consumer app redesigns that just seemed to tack on the "clean", "minimalist", "whitespace" ethos, without really having a clue of an understanding of how users actually used the product. I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly diff…
There is always some resistance to change at first, but over time I’ve only grown more frustrated with it rather than getting used to it, to the point where I’m starting to evaluate alternatives now.
Am I the only one like dense information? There is judicious use of whitespace (Swiss layout, Brockmann et. al) and then there is the whole material UX enchilada. I prefer Foobar2000 over Apple Music. Give me dense, logical and flat layout over 50 page long hierarchical layout full of whitespace. Whitespace is tiring when used extensively.
But imagine staring at Foobar2000 all day as if it is your primary work. You probabbly are looking for just some of the data most of the time and filtering the rest... so in that case maybe less would be better.
On the other hand if you glance at it and want lots of data without clicks, then dense is great.
But your point about "logical" is the key for dense stuff, and getting to what is "logical" can be hard.
Hallelujah. It's not just enterprise apps, either. I've seen more than a few consumer app redesigns that just seemed to tack on the "clean", "minimalist", "whitespace" ethos, without really having a clue of an understanding of how users actually used the product. I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly diff…
God yes, the older reddit interface was so much better. I don't give a shit how pretty the UI is.
Although anytime I mention this I fear they'll take it away...
If you have Product Management the failure was on them for not driving the customer need. Also, this is not me just scapegoating PM... it's actually what I do