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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#181

Post by tabtab »

beamatronic wrote: post #170
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.

Indeed. I sure the hell miss WYSIWYG ui design. The auto-flow "constraint management" of web UI's and CSS turned bicycle science into rocket science. (There was a HN story about this a few weeks ago.) I had Jetsons technology, it felt great, but then it was ripped from my warm productive fingers. Will they do the same with my flying car?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#182

Post by nulagrithom »

> Users absolutely hated the new system.

I feel like this is a universal absolute, doubly so when it comes to enterprise apps (the lone exception being when we switched from Lotus Notes to Gmail -- then only half the company hated the change).

I would've liked to know how long the changes were in place and how it affected productivity metrics, especially the amount of training time spent on new users. As is, the article seems kind of obvious. Enterprise users abhor change; who knew?

> Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!)

This also makes me question the veracity of the article. It's a really terrible metaphor that makes me wonder if they were _solely_ concerned with pretty design on the outset.

I want a dictionary that shows me 1 word per page, with a search bar. The page flipping functionality is useless and can be removed entirely. It's a bad workflow.

I can definitely say that over the past 20 years, our in-house LoB app has developed some really bad workflows as well (business changes a lot over 20 years). Removing these bad workflows would give us back a ton of screen real estate without losing productivity.

The causality is backwards. I don't want to create whitespace by changing the design and ruining the functionality. I want to change the functionality which will create more whitespace and allow room for beautiful design.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#184

Post by udkl »

This is exactly the Google plus vs Facebook argument I've been making over the years. 'Plus', with all it's white spacing was arguably ugly and this was also why it had low user retention that led to it's demise.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#185

Post by tabtab »

ryandrake wrote: post #153
tabtab wrote: post #125

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.…

I’m convinced this happens everywhere, at almost every software company. As a developer, the most demotivating part of my job was the endless redesigns-for-the-sake-of-redesigns that kept happening. It’s ultimately what drove me away from being an individual contributor software engineer. And it’s always for goofy vague reasons: “It looks dated!” “It needs more pop!” “It’s not fresh enough!” (What are we making? Soft…

Everyone is afraid of being "left behind" and not being able to get a job. Keeping one's resume marketable trumps being productive.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#186

Post by dagoat »

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.

I think you need both.

You need to ask/provide a way for users to tell you what they want (fixing or features).

And you also need to observe users using the product.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#187

Post by protomyth »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #39

Never underestimate the power of a data entry person working in a high volume organization with an app that looks like it was designed in 1975. I worked on a potential redesign of the US Navy's medical appointment booking application and the data entry rate and responsiveness of their "ancient" system was far superior to the newly proposed solution (web based).

I've watched in amazement as a person slammed through green-screen after green-screen to enter data while the new "more productive" GUI interface took everyone 10 times as long. Worse, the damn GUI actually required a longer on-boarding period for the new employees.

I miss companies like Palm that had a person who counted the taps to get something done.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#188

Post by tabtab »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #168
chrismeller wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best approach is to watch them do their work and ask a lot of questions. For example, "Why did you have to leave this screen to go find X?"

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#189

Post by lqet »

ryandrake wrote: post #153
tabtab wrote: post #125

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.…

I’m convinced this happens everywhere, at almost every software company. As a developer, the most demotivating part of my job was the endless redesigns-for-the-sake-of-redesigns that kept happening. It’s ultimately what drove me away from being an individual contributor software engineer. And it’s always for goofy vague reasons: “It looks dated!” “It needs more pop!” “It’s not fresh enough!” (What are we making? Soft…

Nobody ever talks about the psychological toll this takes on developers, and also on the overall software quality. If you are just re-building the same UI over and over again because "everyone is now doing it in Django / Angular / Vue / React / {insert future hyped framework}", no developer will go the extra mile to produce a stable, high-quality code base anymore. Why should they, if they instinctively know that they are just coding for the garbage bin? What you get is a team of depressed, cynical developers and low-quality software that barely works, which will then be re-implemented 12-24 months lather in some other framework, possibly by another team of developers because the old team has left in frustration or been fired for lack of motivation. It is a vicious circle that consumes the most productive age of an entire software engineer generation, and (although I am sure some of you will heavily criticize this) I am deeply convinced that the only way out of this is to just stick to basic tools and programming languages that have been around forever. Avoid any framework that is advocated like a religious cult.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#190

Post by beamatronic »

redwall_hp wrote: post #180
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…

This is how I feel about computing in general. GUIs in general were a mistake. Vim is fucking awesome, and there's no replacing a shell and the myriad CLI utilities you have at your disposal. The computer is there to automate repetitive tasks, not create virtual busywork. GUIs generally represent the sacrifice of power and automation for approachability by the lowest common denominator.

I have also thought this through to the following logical conclusion: Imagine computer users being fluent in SQL and everyone sharing one giant database.

Let’s check Twitter...

select message, username from TWEETS order by date desc limit 10

Slightly more realistic is the “semantic web” concept.

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