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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#291

Post by kbenson »

andrepd wrote: post #270
butisaidsudo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the prevalence of office jobs that use computers, being a developer is sort of like being an engineer in the 1960's or before but having the ability to whip up designs for simple mechanical devices that you can build for very low time and money cost, and replicate for free. It's like being the inventor of the slap-chop except that it costs so little to get items out there, that people often just do it for free. I would love it if I was doing some annoying repetitive task like mincing garlic or onions and someone said "hey, I can make that easier. Give me an hour..."

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#292

Post by TeMPOraL »

artursapek wrote: post #164
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.

This seems to be the mainstream school of design, no doubt inspired by what Apple and Google are doing.

Myself, I absolutely hate it, because it puts sellability over productivity for end users. I.e. it literally wastes people's time.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#293

Post by Reelin »

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…

I think old Reddit, HN, and Craigslist are good examples of what I've seen referred to as Brutalist Web Design (https://brutalist-web.design/).

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#294

Post by anitil »

manyxcxi wrote: post #101
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.

> 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…

This story makes me happy. It's what I aspire to

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#295

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jtsummers wrote: post #212
tabtab wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring a learning curve for the sake of argument, the most effective UI's tend to be command-oriented. If you memorize the abbreviated commands, you don't have to traverse menu trees. Command-line interfaces can still have menus for newbies. For example, pressing Enter or giving the command "m" or the fuller "menu" at the command prompt may give a menu similar to: 1 - Search for employees (SE) 2 - New hire (NH) 3 -…

Many emacs modes use something akin to this (see magit as a stellar example). This makes learning it relatively easy (it's discoverable), but becoming a power user is still possible.

Yup. Magit is a stellar example of UI that's both discoverable and ergonomic. It shows you a popup with a list of options available to you at a given stage, with plainly visible keyboard shortcut. But it doesn't block or slow you down with this.

Say you're trying to show git log. The first time around, you'll press "?" to show the top-level popup, notice "l" is for logging, press "l", see the popup for logging commands, notice you need to press "l" again, press it. The next time around, you'll just press "l l" without thinking, and Magit will react as fast as you can type.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#296

Post by anitil »

Shivetya wrote: post #214
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…

I have seen it in ill fated attempts to replace POS systems that were old green screen types to warehousing stocking tools using the same all with new pretty GUI or web page interfaces. Looking slick is great if customer facing but down in the trenches its all about familiarity, speed, and stability.

One pet peeve of mine is that these old systems are often trivially navigable with a (often custom) keyboard, then replaced with something that needs a mouse.

So 'tap, tap, tap, tap, enter' becomes 'tap, click, tap, tap , click'.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#297

Post by TeMPOraL »

mruts wrote: post #154
motohagiography wrote: post #105

Was a PM for a product that got criticism for its lack of density. When you are building a powerful tool for power users, you may need density and a lot of levers for flexibility. The consumer/enterprise distinction is huge here. As a domain expert, I was for a sparse UX that emphasized the awesome just-works power of the product. I'll never forget how one bank IT director customer said, "I just can't pay for somethi…

In my comment about the Bloomberg Terminal, I talked about how it, and any good software (also like Vim and Emacs) makes users feel like a wizard. People, especially enterprise banking users, want to feel powerful when using an app. Like it’s an extension of their own mind and body. If you make something that is valuable but doesn’t give the users a power trip, it will fail. This is just how people work.

It's not just about power trips. It's about utility and context.

Vim and Emacs give you actual power, not just the feeling of it. Vim's "shortcut grammar" and Emacs' deep interoperability are a huge productivity multiplier for any imaginable task that you can reduce to manipulating text.

Information density is about providing context. A good example here would be Google Maps. The app is optimized to be used as a point-to-point navigation tool, but some design decisions - like inconsistent showing of street names - make it pretty much useless as a map. Your UI design may be leading the user down a prescribed path, but if you make it show the minimal amount of information necessary on that path, the UI automatically becomes useless for all other related paths.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#298

Post by thefifthsetpin »

danielvaughn wrote: post #14
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…

God yes, the older reddit interface was so much better. I don't give a shit how pretty the UI is.

Given how aggressively reddit push their terrible no good very bad interface, I figure there has to be some advantage to them to my using it? I don't know what that could be, maybe users struggling to use the new interface looks like engagement to ads?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#299

Post by scarejunba »

vermooten wrote: post #53

I worked at a company whose name begins with K ... exactly this happened. The 'old' UI was an ASP nightmare from the early 2000s but it contained all that the users loved. The new thing never took off, despite the CTO putting his job on the line for it. Another company had a green-screen nightmare from the 1980s replaced by some mouse-driven mofre modern UI - ditto. The users could easily naviate with arrow keys, tab…

What's a "green-screen" in this context? Like a terminal app old school style?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#300

Post by TeMPOraL »

nate wrote: post #43

A champion of data density who has a lot of thought provoking words on design is Edward Tufte: https://www.edwardtufte.com Worth a look if you aren't familiar.

I literally had this discussion today at work. And then couple of weeks ago, when I suggested we drop a bunch of chartjunk on our products' graphs. And then some time earlier too.

Tufte talks about minimizing "chartjunk", maximizing "data ink", and being comfortable with high information density. Charts are tools, and while they may sometimes require some amount of effort to understand, they play to humans' strengths like scanning and pattern matching. I think Tufte got this very right, and it generalizes well to user interfaces.

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