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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#121

Post by pwthornton »

varikin wrote: post #27
duxup wrote: post #8

One point: >Are there things my users really don’t need to see right now? If you don’t know, ask! ASK! ASK! ASK! For the love of god please ask your users. I worked for a company with a big clunky enterprise app. It got redesigned numerous times and rolled out with big fanfare. Nobody who used for any significant amount of time was involved in any of the redesigns. It was horrible every time with numerous changes jus…

> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.

Some of this comes down to phrasing. We should both ask and observe (but it has to be the right kind of asking).

The asking should be user interviews and contextual inquiry to understand their problems. What are they trying to solve? We shouldn't be asking them to design our products for us, because users often don't know what they want or what they even do. This should typically come very early in the process as foundational work.

Observing people both working and in a usability testing setting will help us learn what is and isn't working. As we get into the prototyping stage, it should be a lot more observing and testing.

I think what you are responding to is this idea that all we need to do is just talk to our users, and you are correct, that is very wrong. Just asking users what they want is a good way to give them something they won't use.

When we do ask people questions, they need to be done in a methodical and probing way.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#122

Post by ljoshua »

manyxcxi wrote: post #101
varikin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.

> Watch them work. This x1000! I took on a freelance project for a heavy machinery hauling company. They were a year into transitioning away from some customized off the shelf Enterprise scheduling and dispatch system into some custom built software by an “Enterprise” consulting company. They were originally bringing me in to audit what the team that was building it but that pretty much changed on the day I submitted…

Great war story with enough specifics to be learnable, thanks for sharing! Reflects my experience as well.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#123

Post by arendtio »

I don't think the root problem is white space.

Taking the dictionary example: A good dictionary doesn't display a hundred words per page. Instead, you just need a box to write down the word you search and a few lines to display the results. Plenty of space for the designer to turn white.

The problem is somewhere in the process where someone creates an app without having experience with the old system and not understanding how the app is supposed to be used. It is quite common that UX designers do not have that kind of knowledge, but then they have to make sure to include people who have it (workshops, interviews, prototype testing, etc.).

I am not saying that white space is always good the way it is used today, but the problem isn't a clean look. The problem is a dysfunctional design and the process that caused it.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#124

Post by freedomben »

manyxcxi wrote: post #101
varikin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.

> Watch them work. This x1000! I took on a freelance project for a heavy machinery hauling company. They were a year into transitioning away from some customized off the shelf Enterprise scheduling and dispatch system into some custom built software by an “Enterprise” consulting company. They were originally bringing me in to audit what the team that was building it but that pretty much changed on the day I submitted…

My first paid gig I did this with wild success also. After that I tried to do this several times and was always met with incredulity. Management never seemed to grok the importance of this, to the point where I started thinking maybe my first experience had been a fluke (gaslighting). While I no longer think this is practical (unless you are the one in charge), I do recommend it whenever possible. The product will be orders of magnitude better, but expect management to strain at the gnat of paying a software developer to watch a non-technical person do their job.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#125

Post by tabtab »

Re: Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all!

My goodness, Flintones even. The fashion chase is becoming obsessive and wasteful. As I've ranted about many times on HN, UI faddism is a huge time and resource drain and the industry should just say no or see a therapist.

It sounds strange, but desktop UI's around 2000 pretty much reached the pinnacle of business UI's. The web slid us downhill with its stateless ways, unpredictable layout results, and now wasting screen space while copying touch-screen-oriented design for mouse users who don't need swollen boundaries. Use 5-pixel lines to visually segregate panels, saving you about 20 pixels of width versus white space. ("Web" pixels, not nec. actual pixels.)

(The only exception is perhaps drill-down link-heavy lists/reports/charts. The web served these well.)

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#126

Post by matthewowen »

dictum wrote: post #11

I feel like the author really wanted a scapegoat for a process that was flawed from the start (redesigning a product without research, empathy with users, feedback, gradual introduction with small test groups etc.) 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 recommendatio…

Those are process elements, and the goal of them is primarily to produce a good result.

A better process may have reduced the likelihood of a bad design, but the bad process is the meta-problem, not the problem-problem.

Some design decisions really are bad in ways that are counterintuitive to a lot of designers. Reducing information density is often one of them.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#127

Post by devonkim »

manyxcxi wrote: post #101
varikin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.

> Watch them work. This x1000! I took on a freelance project for a heavy machinery hauling company. They were a year into transitioning away from some customized off the shelf Enterprise scheduling and dispatch system into some custom built software by an “Enterprise” consulting company. They were originally bringing me in to audit what the team that was building it but that pretty much changed on the day I submitted…

You did the work of a product manager, business analyst, and engineer all in one. This is what consulting is supposed to be but most companies are merely hiring contractors and are uninterested in any challenges to their requirements (that were never derived from the real world in any way, just an ivory tower of management / conceptual consultants). So you also had a good client as well that respected your proposal and were willing to re-assess their assumptions.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#128

Post by jrochkind1 »

> Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips!

I'm not sure this is about whitespace or information density.

I think that users, especially users using something as part of their job on a regular basis ("enterprise"), hate change. Any change. If they know how to use the thing as part of their job now, it is very difficult to make a significant change that they won't (at least initially) say they hate and want the old thing back. Even if the change would have been liked better by more new users/customers. Even if they hated the old thing too!

And aside from just change-aversion, of course, there may have been lots of knowledge/decisions about what users actually needed to do to do their jobs "encoded" in the old UX, as a result of lots of changes over time, that can be lost when creating a brand-new-from-scratch UX -- especially if you aren't doing a lot of (or any? it wasn't mentioned in the post) UX research in advance of the re-design.

I think this story may be about change, without necessarily being able to conclude anything about the factors of the change/design, such as whitespace, or any other design elements.

If you're doing UX design, you should be doing UX research. And not assuming any universal principles about whitespace or information density from this blog post.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#129

Post by jrochkind1 »

varikin wrote: post #27
duxup wrote: post #8

One point: >Are there things my users really don’t need to see right now? If you don’t know, ask! ASK! ASK! ASK! For the love of god please ask your users. I worked for a company with a big clunky enterprise app. It got redesigned numerous times and rolled out with big fanfare. Nobody who used for any significant amount of time was involved in any of the redesigns. It was horrible every time with numerous changes jus…

> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.

This is why user/usability/UX research is actually a _thing_. Like a discipline, a thing to learn, a thing where experience and skill matter.

Yes, you can't just "ask". But there are certainly ways to learn. Doing a major UX redesign without doing any UX research seems like asking for trouble -- and I don't trust the conclusions drawn from the outcome, still without being based on UX research, either.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#130

Post by funkaster »

I think that this is more of a tale of not doing proper user research. If they've done their homework, they would know what data users of the platform need at their fingertip, and they wouldn't have hide it behind clickable-collapsable UIs.

My take on this: work with a PM that's really good at doing (proper) user research.

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