Whitespace killed an enterprise app

Have you heard of Bloomberg Terminal? Thousands of people stare at BT all day long full of dense information. You can attest to its success by the fact that it is the defacto standard in financial analysis.

Bloomberg could make it "modern" full of whitespace but they deliberately don't. Dense contextual information in my view is better than whitespace decorated vomit that we see in today's UX/UI trends.

You can do it, but it requires tons and tons of effort. And even after all that, you can't escape the backlash.

There's a great series by Jensen Harris, Office Program Manager, about how they designed the Ribbon: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-... (you can find the rest in his blog archives, unfortunately the images are gone)

It was an incredibly complex undertaking, Microsoft did many studies, had focus groups and the whole thing (Office after all, is a major business to them, worth billions of dollars).

The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions).

And yet if you read many of the comments on tech forums you'd think Microsoft killed the users' puppies.

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 Wall St use Bloomberg on one screen, and our product on the other.

Our app was probably the anti-thesis to the Bloomberg Terminal in almost everyway: “modern” design, tons of white space, a web app, making you have to log in every 30 minutes for “security”, no keybindings.

I’m sure most of HN have never used the terminal, but let me give an analogy. The Bloomberg Terminal is like using Emacs or Vim, they make you feel powerful, they make you feel like a wizard.

Our app was like google docs, you never felt like you were in direct control of it. You never felt like it was an extension of yourself. Unsurprisingly, even though our app was incredibly useful and provided portfolio analytics that you could only get from excel (our biggest competitor), it, and the company, was largely a failure. Instead of being worth billions, we were capped at a valuation of 200m for over 5 years.

I believe completely that the company’s failure was due to our “modern” white space heavy app.

> 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.

>Use color deliberately.

And think of the color blind. Especially dark red shouldn't be the only way this information is highlighted. 8% of men are the kind of red-green colorblind, where dark red and black is not easily distinguishable.

If 8% of men don't see your error notifications, maybe that shouldn't be the only kind of highlighting (or choose a color that is less likely to affect so many people, like orange).

>Let users export data, instead

And maybe even import. I have a lot of administrative tasks I could script easily, if I had more direct access. But writing a python script using a headless browser, which breaks every time they update, doesn't sound as attractive.

And a point they kind of forgot: Make it perform well. There are so many enterprise apps where you need to click a lot and wait so much time in between you start doing something else, which reduces your flow.

A second point: Give people keyboard shortcuts, and make them apparent through tooltips. Your power users will highly appreciate if they can do things more quickly with the right shortcuts.