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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#261

Post by goatlover »

beamatronic wrote: post #194
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…

Not only does it happen almost everywhere but is has been going on since the beginning. There were people in the 90’s who did nothing but study UI’s, what happened to them??

The web happened. And now people use the web GUI to make destkop and mobile applications.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#262

Post by tlrobinson »

xbryanx wrote: post #244

I think about this every time I watch some physician friends using Epic or any Electronic Health Records system. Those things are dense as hell and packed full of data and utility. You won't see a bit of wasted space. Different problems require different solutions.

> You won't see a bit of wasted space

Ahem...

"How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose" https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital...

> Do you spot the problem? Perhaps not, since it is hiding in the middle of this dense screen,

(that quote is from part 2 of the series of posts)

Of course that's not the only reason this incident occurred, but it likely contributed to it.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#263

Post by clintonb »

kbenson wrote: post #177
manyxcxi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> it is still one of my proudest projects even though it was one of the least “sexy” I’ve ever done. I think one of the most valuable thing software engineers can do for themselves in some circumstances is attempt to shift perspective towards assessing projects by how many people they help and how. The most rewarding projects I can think of are the ones where a day or two after rolling them out, I'm contacted by a fe…

One of my best work hackathons was spent asking non-technical people what parts of their job sucked, and helping them automate those tasks. The last project involved updating a button that cloned data to go further, and clone some additional data. That work took me an hour, but saved a team at least 10 hours every month!

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#264

Post by masklinn »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #232
richardcrossley wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the Bloomberg Terminal style. I watched one of my users retrieve some product information yesterday, a few key presses and it was there. Much faster than a web application. The colour scheme also looks good. A black background gives you many more high contrast choices. Try using yellow or cyan on a light background. It seems most of the colours are based on the old 8-bit selection; red, green, blue, cyan, yell…

Actually orange is the oldest. The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course). Everyone else used green so they went with orange to be distinctive.

> The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course).

It's probably not entirely true given there were dozens of known phosphors, and there were monochrome displays in other colors (e.g. the 1980 Apple Monitor III was available in green and white).

However assuming they went with pretty standard equipments green was by far the most common followed by amber. Amber is also somewhat softer on the eyes, which might have been an argument in favour given they'd have folks looking at these displays all day long, especially for charts which would fill the terminal with : green monitors were OK when you had mostly black (text, curses interfaces) but it was way too harsh otherwise.

Our first computer actually had both green and amber displays, the amber display was dedicated for games and the like, anything which would light up a significant fraction of the display at once would go to the smaller amber monitor instead of the larger green one.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#265

Post by choward »

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…

The new Reddit interface wasn't designed for users. It was designed for the customers (advertisers).

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#266

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

tabtab wrote: post #140
fermienrico wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe how many times I've heard your story but in different companies. I feel like there is an opportunity to make a graphical user interface framework that mimics old terminals. Full screen apps that leverage use of the keyboard shortcuts or hell even a custom keyboard specifically made for industrial use. Basically a IBM 400 system but running on modern software stack. Airlines have stuck with their UI an…

Being easy to use and easy to learn are not necessarily the same thing. GUI's are generally easier to learn, but not necessarily the most productive once a typical user reaches the plateau of the learning curve. A UI designed to minimize hand and eye movements may have a longer learning curve than a GUI. The ideal solution may thus depend on staff turnover rate.

I think you'd be surprised how quickly people can pick up on an interface that is as simple as the kinds of TUIs we're talking about. These kinds of things were very common for all sorts of tasks throughout the late 80s and early 90s and I don't think I've ever heard of the learning curve being a problem.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#267

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

Wow, I kinda wish I worked somewhere with so few real problems they had to invent new ones just to keep busy.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#268

Post by rurp »

mo1ok wrote: post #222
renjimen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 utt…

Netflix is the king of this awfulness for me. Every time I use it the homepage is different. Different lists show up, disappear, change position, etc; even my list of saved shows that I reference all of the time suffers from this. Sticking with literally any layout I've seen on there would be better than the randomness that I have to navigate through each time.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#269

Post by andrepd »

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.

>Watch them work

Exactly. It's your job to see that, for example, people spend lots of time manually doing X in Excel, and design a tool to do it for them.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#270

Post by andrepd »

butisaidsudo wrote: post #243
kbenson wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is still one of my proudest projects even though it was one of the least “sexy” I’ve ever done. I think one of the most valuable thing software engineers can do for themselves in some circumstances is attempt to shift perspective towards assessing projects by how many people they help and how. The most rewarding projects I can think of are the ones where a day or two after rolling them out, I'm contacted by a fe…

My wife is a genetic counsellor, and as part of her work she regular has to use this one formula to calculate the probability of this one genetic condition I can't quite recall. Because of the complexity and the importance of getting it right, it took her around 10-15 minutes every time she needed to use it. She, and her colleagues, are pretty much luddites so a basic calculator was their only tool. I spent 10 minute…

It probably boggles the mind of people like us, used to being power command-line users and automating our boring tasks with powerful tools, to hear stories like this.
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