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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#161

Post by darkpuma »

lowercased wrote: post #78

> See where you might reduce visual complexity by combining elements — for example, by putting a customer’s first and last name in the same field. Great, until people want to sort/filter by stuff that is now crammed in to one field. Sort by state? Sorry - it's now "city/state/country/postalcode" Some people will want things one way, some will want it another, and you'll be tasked with making it work "both ways" - jus…

> putting a customer’s first and last name in the same field.

This can also present unexpected difficulties for people who's "first name" contains a space. It will appear as though that unified field contains their middle name too, which it might, but the customer might be using their middle name as a de facto part of their first name in systems such as on their credit card.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#162

Post by alexbecker »

Jira drives me nuts with this. I have a 34" monitor and with six columns in our Kanban board I can see 4, maybe 5 tickets per column. With 10 people on a team it means constant scrolling to see what people are working on.

It finally pushed me over the edge to use user stylesheets. A bunch of "margin: 0 !important" and "display: none" and I get twice as much information on my screen at the cost of... looking polished I guess?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#163

Post by NearAP »

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…

The challenge with Enterprise software is that the people who pay for it are usually not the people who use it everyday or a lot. So the vendor takes feedback from the end-users but they still have to demo to the guys holding the purse strings and when those guys give feedback (usually different from that of the every day user), vendor has to go with feedback from the purse string holder. If the vendor doesn't do this, the project doesn't get approved.

I think the proper thing here is for the purse string holders to defer to the views/feedback of the every day users.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#164

Post by artursapek »

mruts wrote: post #25

A great example of a really nice information dense app is the Bloomberg terminal. Maybe it’s ugly (a lot of people say this, but I personally don’t think so), but all the right design choices have been made. High Contrast, monospaced fonts, extensive keybindings, absolutely no wasted space. And, most essential, it’s not a web app. I used to work at a portfolio analytics company who’s explicit goal was: to have all of…

People who say Bloomberg is ugly have a very shallow view of what design means. It's the form over function way of seeing things. These are the people Apple markets its products to.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#165

Post by cmiles74 »

noir_lord wrote: post #93
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.

I've found its not that they lie (all the time) it's that often they don't have the time or mental energy to figure out what they want and even if they do they lack the tools to communicate it. That is fundamentally a human problem and I'm not sure what technology can really do to significantly improve the solution which is to slog through it and listen to feedback.

I think many people don't really understand how they perform the functions of their job. Some things they enjoy doing, some things feel like busy work: all the things are mixed together over the course of the day. Picking and teasing the separate pieces apart and dealing with them individually is always hard for people and for some more than others.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#166

Post by hinkley »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #128

> 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…

Yeah I have similar concerns about the lessons learned. Power users rely on muscle memory. Productivity is boosted by familiarity. Unless there is a great deal of turnover on the team, the thing they are familiar with is the thing they have.

If you want to change that you have to come at it with respect and empathy. Fields nobody uses anymore? You can take them away but that changes tab order. So you might have to do that piecemeal or one screen at a time to give people time to adjust.

UX for pros runs counter to a lot of guidelines for beginners. You’re trying to reduce the amount of attention they have to dedicate so they can go faster or juggle the feelings of the person they’re talking to. They want speed and predictability. Discovery is only for very obscure workflows. Important, yes, but not paramount.

I’ve seen this even with developer tools. When someone starts yelling at a dev the conversation goes smoother when the task is straightforward. “Let me just pop in here and look... here’s your problem.”

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#167

Post by lolsal »

> In the above example, note the prominence of the single red highlight in the gray-themed table, thanks to the lack of other color. Each row suffers slightly in its horizontal scannability, but at the gain of increased table-wide scannability. Consider what is more important for your application.

For what it's worth, I found the blue table easier to spot the red numbers. I'm red/green colorblind and I could not differentiate the red from the grey table coloring very well. With the blue it stood out.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#168

Post by erikpukinskis »

chrismeller wrote: post #132
vectorEQ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ofcourse you dont ask them how to design. you are hired as the designer. ask them for specifications / limitations / painpoints in the current system etc. etc. and base your design upon their feedback on actual relevant questions. a plumber doesnt ask his customer how to plumb. just which pipes need fixin! doesn't go fix the toilet if the shower is broken :S

I think the better analogy would be installing a whole new bathroom (it’s a redesign after all). In that case the plumber could and should ask where the sink is going, even if he was only told to move the toilet. Why? Because maybe the sewage line is over there and about to be covered over with concrete and they’ll have to tear up all of that to move it in two weeks, but the sink hadn’t arrived yet so no one told him…

> you can’t just ask a user “how could this screen work better”

Why would you ask that anyway? You've already assumed the problem and solution at that point.

You ask how it's going, very generally and let the conversation lead you to their pain points.

You don't ask about the UI, which they are not an authority on. You ask about their subjective experience, which they are.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#169

Post by 20years »

kaolti wrote: post #112

Absolutely nothing to do with whitespace and everything to do with a broken UX workflow.

That was my thought too.

"Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips!"

"They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking."

Sounds more like they added way more friction in the new design. Users now had to click multiple areas to fill out everything they needed which slows down work flow.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#170

Post by beamatronic »

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…

Agree - I could take most of this comment back to the late 90s and most of it would still apply. One thing you could do back then was with visual GUI editors, you could place buttons and widgets where you wanted them and change it quickly.
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