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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#321

Post by gsich »

carlmr wrote: post #29

>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).…

>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).

While it is true that it's about 8% in total, there is a gradient on how red/green color blind one is.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#322

Post by lqet »

crooked-v wrote: post #221
lqet wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My bet is on React

Exactly, it is a bet. A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time.

In the context of web development, in the past 10 years I have seen other developers and myself write wrappers for the same JavaScript libraries again and again and again in so many frameworks and for so many CMS I lost track and count (incomplete list: typo3, Drupal, Wordpress, GWT, jQuery, AngularJS, React). This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon. From a macroeconomic point of view, it was all just an incredible waste of time. But the customers of the various companies I worked at as a student and after finishing university loved hearing the name of the frameworks. I am pretty convinced that it actually would've been enough to just write bare JS code and a HTML page by hand and sell it to them as "written in bootstrapped AngularJS". This would've saved hundreds of man hours.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#323

Post by jrochkind1 »

devonkim wrote: post #127
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…

You did the work of a product manager, business analyst, and engineer all in one. This is what consulting is supposed to be but most companies are merely hiring contractors and are uninterested in any challenges to their requirements (that were never derived from the real world in any way, just an ivory tower of management / conceptual consultants). So you also had a good client as well that respected your proposal a…

Yep, most clients aren't interested in _paying_ for it. "I wound up spending 6 weeks before even proposing anything that had to do with technology." And they start paying without knowing exactly how long/how much money it will take to get to the end, or even what the end is.

Penny wise pound foolish.

To be fair, they may not _trust_ that you'll actually do a _good job_. There are so many terrible consultants out there, and clients are not very good at evaluating who's going to be good.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#324

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

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??

They are called UX researchers and they exist alive and well today. There is a huge difference between design backed by research and just doing things to keep up with times.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#325

Post by jrochkind1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #285
jancsika wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've ever used. Someone that has no clue what the users are doing makes a decision about how best to design an app that they don't even know how to test. You're talking at cross-purposes. To get a sense of how people are interacting with the software you have to watch them interact with the software. The moment you ask them a question about UX you'll begin to get low quality input that you can't trust: * user is ex…

Watching someone use an interface can be low-quality information, especially when that interface is already heavily optimized to guide the user down a prescribed path. If that's your sole input, then you're essentially doing a naïve gradient descent, and you're bound to be stuck in a local minimum. Asking users, in addition to watching them struggle, can inform you on what they're actually trying to achieve, and what…

I do try to avoid getting them to tell me _solutions_ though.

"What's the most annoying part of your job with this software" (with followup questions to understand why and what they were trying to do and _why_ they were trying to do it) is better than "What feature do you want that would most make this software less annoying"?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#326

Post by ummonk »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #115
bachmeier wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except users lie all the time. That's the starting point for all the garbage enterprise apps I've ever used. Someone that has no clue what the users are doing makes a decision about how best to design an app that they don't even know how to test. Don't ask them how to design the app. Ask them what they do with the app, then find the best way to get them where they need to go. Then let them test the first and second…

You all them what they do, and they say things like "I open my email, ...": If you watch them you see that what they mean is (dramatised!) "I open my browser, which defaults at Google, then on the Google home page I type 'bing', click on the first search result, then go back because it wasn't Bing search but something else, then read the results and find bing search engine, follow that, login to Bing, then access the…

I once saw a professor type "google" into the browser search box (which had google selected as the search engine), click on the first result, and then type in their Google query.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#327

Post by jrochkind1 »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #316
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.

Its not always an option, but another alternative to asking and observing is becoming. If you yourself (or someone on your team) have previously been or are currently a user then you can usually answer a lot of the questions yourself with much less of a bias and maybe find solutions you wouldn't be able to by just asking and observing.

While this can give you insight, I think there's a huge danger of thinking you are a _typical_ user when you are not at all representative. I have seen this happen with disastrous consequences. I think "becoming" can supplement, but never ever substitute for observation.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#328

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

DenisM wrote: post #276

The typical person making a purchase decision doesn't know what the app does in any detail. So if he sees less information on screen he thinks it's easier to use, as compared to more information on screen. Of course the opposite is normally true, which is where the trouble starts. It also looks similar to simple consumer apps that the decision-maker is used to. Finally the UX designer says magic words like "clean" an…

You are confusing UX designer with UI designer. UX designer does not use words such as clean and simple or beautiful that’s the talk of someone who does no user research which is precisely what UX designers focus on primarily.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#329

Post by Aeolun »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #226
michaelcampbell wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in addition, that they are aware it is batshit crazy too.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#330

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

hindsightbias wrote: post #136

If someone in the UX space wants to change the world, start a twitch stream and review websites/apps. I have several scratch-my-eyes-out sites I use every week for fodder and am sure you would never lack for suggestions.

Maybe I’ll take you up on it. Give me a list of sites you want reviewed.
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