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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#331

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

supermw wrote: post #159

I see this all the time. It is a symptom of blowhard UX designers who don't understand there's a difference between mass consumer and enterprise app design. They look at a shitty looking enterprise interface and snort "I can make this so much better! Let me introduce you to Material design!" If you want to make pretty little apps that get you tons of likes on Dribbble or whatever, go make consumer apps. When it comes…

Correction: UI designer. I wish developers would stop grouping them into one category, totally different fields.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#332

Post by Aeolun »

lowercased wrote: post #88
duxup wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry I worked in was networking (data center products, routers for ISPs, etc), but technical support. I did that for 20 years. Even though it was pretty high end stuff.... everyone hates technical support and I found that generally companies eventually devalue it as time goes on. I got tired of that system. I got paid really well but just got tired of seeing the atmosphere at company after company get more ne…

> Then someone would roll out metrics that show those folks overseas who just close cases are doing great because ... they just close cases without solving the issue. We've all got bad metrics stories, but wanted to share this one. Friend at megacorp was doing JS work, and working with the offshore team in India (few people in the US, and 3-4x as many in India IIRC). India team was "killing it" because of all the iss…

I feel like my current company was going this direction for a bit, but they’ve reversed course and are now bringing all development on-site, if not in-house.

Which is really the only way to develop if you want anything to get done.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#333

Post by frosted-flakes »

Mindwipe wrote: post #97
fermienrico wrote: post #2

Am I the only one like dense information? There is judicious use of whitespace (Swiss layout, Brockmann et. al) and then there is the whole material UX enchilada. I prefer Foobar2000 over Apple Music. Give me dense, logical and flat layout over 50 page long hierarchical layout full of whitespace. Whitespace is tiring when used extensively.

Whitespace is toxic in design. As a trend I can't wait for it to die in fire.

Too much white space is bad. White space is not a trend. That's like saying colour is a trend.

Proper use of white space is an essential part of good design. But when there's so much space between elements on a page that it shoots the page height to the moon, that's bad.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#334

Post by manigandham »

This is everywhere, not just enterprise. Take a look at craigslist and how every attempt to make it "pretty" has failed. Many successful products are focused on getting things done, even if they're exceedingly ugly in doing so.

There seems to be a lack of education and experience in teaching designers that UI != UX and what design really means is helping users reach goals, not just looking nice.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#335

Post by komali2 »

nafey wrote: post #131
SlightRespect wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.

Not to forget amazon.com. I am actually in awe of their boldness in completely ignoring UI design trends.

Well, minus their shit video streaming site, I agree.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#336

Post by manigandham »

gk1 wrote: post #13

Please change the clickbait title. The app didn't die, they just had to revert the design change. That aside, the Freshbooks redesign last year pushed me to switch to QuickBooks for exactly this reason. The new design had the stereotypical "modern app" design, but every common task required 5x more time than before. For example, just to change the category of an expense you have to 1) click on the expense, wait for t…

Xero just did this with their Invoice section. Everything is fancy looking but has less visible data and less features with 10x more work to do the same thing.

But people want Excel levels of functionality, not a brochure, and the community has been unanimous with negative feedback so maybe they'll improve while they still can.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#337

Post by manigandham »

duxup wrote: post #16
fermienrico wrote: post #2

Am I the only one like dense information? There is judicious use of whitespace (Swiss layout, Brockmann et. al) and then there is the whole material UX enchilada. I prefer Foobar2000 over Apple Music. Give me dense, logical and flat layout over 50 page long hierarchical layout full of whitespace. Whitespace is tiring when used extensively.

It really depends on the use case, but yeah dense can be fine. But imagine staring at Foobar2000 all day as if it is your primary work. You probabbly are looking for just some of the data most of the time and filtering the rest... so in that case maybe less would be better. On the other hand if you glance at it and want lots of data without clicks, then dense is great. But your point about "logical" is the key for de…

People are already naturally good at filtering out irrelevant information automatically. We do this all day as we take in data and focus on what we want.

So a dense UI can be naturally worked with while a lean UI offers no alternative.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#338

Post by ioddly »

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 hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.

I'm actually trying to "redesign" an app (I put design in quotes because I'm a dev and just trying to make a personal project look nice) and one of the struggles I have had is that high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience. So much nicer to have everything you care about in a single screen.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#339

Post by kabacha »

Oh the irony of posting this on medium. On my laptop the content is merely 30% of the screen - there's a big banner, pop up, and big footer. To boot to that 60% of width is dead white space too. I'm excited to see the death a frankenstein medium.com has become - it's completely unreadable without postprocessing extensions.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#340

Post by woogiewonka »

briandear wrote: post #204

The author suggests Google’s “Material” but in my experience, Google has it wrong compared to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. For example, Google hides stuff behind icons with no text. Unless you already know the UI, you are hunting around for what you need (remember screensharing on Google Hangouts?) On Apple’s apps, icons always come with a text label and rarely are things hidden behind unnamed icons. Google al…

Google UX in general is atrocious. They keep changing the format on every product so you never know where to look. The use of dark patterns is especially horrible. I don't know if what they do is on purpose terrible, or someone just failed at their job, but Google and material design in apps is particularly bad at doing things for the user. Any time someone references Google or some other large corporation and say "see, they are doing it this way" I want to slap them.
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