Whitespace killed an enterprise app • Hacker News Board

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#221

Post by crooked-v » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

lqet wrote: post #189

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Eventually, one of those current frameworks will "have been around forever". My bet is on React or one of its descendants, because viewed as a generic API it's a pretty good philosophical refinement of preexisting non-web-specific UI frameworks.

For example, there's now a framework that implements the React API for general-purpose terminal rendering, without actually involving any web stuff at all: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#222

Post by mo1ok » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

renjimen wrote: post #45

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #4

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…

Spotify. These days it's so hard to organise or browse your own music collection.

Oh man, glad I'm not the only one I noticed this. It used to take ~2 seconds to find my favorite playlist and play it. Now it takes upwards of 10-20 seconds.

On the dedicated "select a playlist" page with the squares, it even freaking re-organizes the squares every time you view it! Imagine if your desktop icons re-organized themselves in some arbitrary way every time you needed to open a program, and you get the utter destruction of muscle memory that can make up for the gaps in efficient design.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#223

Post by seabird » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

Modern UI design is awful. It might work for Joe Moron, who is just scrolling through video clips and short fragments of text, but I can't imagine why you would ever try to apply design principles designed for that case to professional users. Do people really think they can take the complexity out of these inherently complex business systems? I'm not saying that everything has to look like shit, but no amount of dumbing down an interface is going to fix the fact that certain software needs to display an intimidating amount of info, and that the learning curve for that software is going to be pretty brutal.

I want to wake up from this nightmare. Software like Bloomberg Terminal and CATIA doesn't need to be beautiful web apps with clean, !minimal! Material design, they need to tear through the issues they're meant to solve as quickly and easily as possible, even the reality of that is a little ugly.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#224

Post by GuB-42 » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #9

It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. Someone’s this is OK but in a professional conetwxt it often isn’t. I can’t even imagine if IDEs like Visual Studio were designed “spacious” and “minimalistic”. It would look cute but you wouldn’t get anything done. Some things are just complex and there is no way to design that away without hurting productivit…

Not even that. It is designed for aesthetics.

That something I didn't realize until lately but aesthetics is hugely important. We once updated our internal issue tracker and everyone raved about how better it is now. The thing is: absolutely nothing changed for the average user besides the style. Things like more tasteful color choice, a more modern look with square corners, etc... nothing practical.

Also, from some guys at Microsoft: if you didn't change the UI, from the user point of view, you didn't do anything.

The problem with modern UIs for beginners is that too much is hidden. Panels that only appear when swiped from the side, parts that give no indication of being clickable, highly abstract icons, lack of consistency (ex: the "hamburger" menu can be anywhere, or not be present at all).

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#225

Post by rodolphoarruda » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

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.

A friend's company actually films users using software/websites, analyse their reactions and build a thorough report on UX. All their science is based on the concepts from IA -- information architecture -- from a decade or so ago.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#226

Post by PurpleBoxDragon » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

michaelcampbell wrote: post #203

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…

We have this issue now. Inevitably when the actual users of the app report issues with this or that, the answer from the dev team is almost always, "Works as designed". Yes, we know, THE DESIGN IS BROKEN . And then, nothing. New features come out though, most of which aren't needed or deprecate features that we actually like. So I'm sure some Project Manager is being paid handsomely.

>the answer from the dev team is almost always, "Works as designed".

When I say 'works as designed', what I'm actually saying is that I didn't have control over the design, go talk to the ones who did.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#227

Post by toss1 » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

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.

Yes, users do lie all the time.

So ASK, but do not ask direct questions (e.g., what do you want?).

Instead, ask what are their problems, their pain points, and what items they rely on most.

And OBSERVE -- watch what they actually do. What items they most rely upon (i.e., do NOT change that stuff if you can avoid it).

These answers & observations can then form the basis of your solution, which should relentlessly focus on their needs (and not your own design conceits).

Story from a friend who wrote & sold software into IT shops: When he asked "Do you like these features and would you buy this software?", he got all kinds of "Yes" answers, would write the package, and find few buyers.

When he switched to asking (basically) "What are your pain points, what is aggravating, time consuming, etc?", then writing software to address those issues, he got plenty of sales and happy customers.

It's the indirect question that matters.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#228

Post by jarym » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

Have to agree with this. Too many times I've seen UX people brought in who see the ONLY path to simplification as removing things /they/ don't perceive as necessary. They're flat out wrong - you can simplify also by using the suggestions mentioned in this article.

Sometimes the strategy pays off. But for enterprise apps with high information density it often doesn't. New systems end up lacking essential features just because a few people who never needed to use the original system (and would not need to use the new one either) end up stripping things away.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#229

Post by blueboo » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

seabird wrote: post #223

Modern UI design is awful. It might work for Joe Moron, who is just scrolling through video clips and short fragments of text, but I can't imagine why you would ever try to apply design principles designed for that case to professional users. Do people really think they can take the complexity out of these inherently complex business systems? I'm not saying that everything has to look like shit, but no amount of dumb…

Well, let's challenge ourselves: what is the best designed (digital) interface with the deepest usability? Or some outstanding interfaces that square that circle?

I'm familiar with 3d software suites, and they're (mostly) all highly-configurable, permitting custom layouts, panels, toolbars, and even enabling intermediate users to create UI tools.

To your point, they're also ferociously complicated for novices.

Bloomberg is a funny example. It's a well-indexed reference, rather than an expressive tool, so mastering its shortcut-dense interface is an affordable cost to professionals of modest technical sophistication.

I wonder if TurboTax is in the running; for all its blandness, in 2019 it's exceedingly transparent and clear guide to doing an extremely complicated task. I hasten to acknowledge that's hardly going to be a universal belief.

Maybe Gmail? But again the functionality is fairly shallow...

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#230

Post by kevindong » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

Another modern web design pattern that I hate is when a website uses an excessive amount of AJAX requests. The practical effect of this behavior is that you see the UI update many, many times before the data you're looking for is actually shown. While the data is being loaded, you just see placeholders and you don't feel like you should do anything until the entire page finishes loading.

For instance, when I log into the Chase website, there's 8 UI updates (i.e. 8 sets of loading bars/HTTP requests; see below) that have to load before I can see the recent transactions on my account. Each chunk of requests must finish before the following chunk can start. All in all, it takes ~7.1 seconds for the page/recent transactions to load.

---

The 8 UI updates the Chase website goes through before it finishes loading/you can see your recent transactions:

1. Initial blue loading screen with a spinning loading icon

2. Tan colored background color replaces screen #1

3. Header loads

4. The blank outlines of the main UI components loads (without any data in them/with placeholder loading bars)

5. All of my Chase account metadata (account type, current balance, and last four digits of the account number) loads

6. More in-depth data of the first account on the list loads (available credit, payment due date, minimum payment due, etc.)

7. Recent transactions panel starts to load (with no data/with only a placeholder loading bar)

8. Recent transactions are shown

At this point, the page is finished loading.