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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#351

Post by int_19h »

maxxxxx wrote: post #70
rgoulter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI

This is great. Makes me think of the change from Visual Studio from 2008 to 2010. They made a very good IDE into a slow, unreadable mess with much less functionality just to have a “flat” interface. I still don’t understand that nobody at MS noticed how bad that change was. Or more likely people weren’t listened to. Even after almost 10 years they barely have caught up to what they had with 2008.

It was a major rewrite of large chunks of the interface from native C++ using raw Win32 calls (and said C++ was written back in 1996 in many cases, to the point where it'd do AddRef/Release calls by hand sometimes - forget RAII and anything that you know of modern C++), to C# and WPF. And it was necessary even solely from an engineering perspective, because adding features to that original code was becoming a huge pain.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#353

Post by Avery3R »

delecti wrote: post #247
duxup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think that was just one I bookmarked at some point and there it is in my history ;)

Other than "np", as in "np.reddit.com", which is used for "no-participation mode", I think the other two-letter sub-domains are used for language codes. I think at one point in reddit's history doing things like de.reddit.com could give a german site, and so on. I'm not sure what "ud" would refer to, but I assume it's similar.

np is implemented as a language code. Subreddits have to change their stylesheets for that language for it to work.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#354

Post by acutesoftware »

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 wish more web apps would give a bit more choice on information density and layout - remember desktop software 15 years ago? You change all the colours, fonts, layouts (sometimes) so it suited you.

White space is great for new users to help not overload them, but after a few weeks of use, most should be able to go to their options and change the layout to save all this pointless mouse wheel scrolling.

I am impressed at the responses in this thread - I honestly thought I was in the minority about this, but hopefully the fashion moves a little more towards functionality

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#355

Post by leetcrew »

crowbahr wrote: post #250
criddell wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better for them, not necessarily for you. Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.

It's sanding down a barrier to entry that was already fairly low, in my opinion. They haven't really made it much lower either. Integrating RES into the main site would've been most of what they needed to get going...

imo the killer feature of RES is that it makes it extremely easy to manage arbitrarily many sockpuppet accounts. there are other nice features of course, but the ease of managing multiple accounts always stood out as one of the biggest perks to me.

in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#356

Post by shakna »

criddell wrote: post #259
crowbahr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sanding down a barrier to entry that was already fairly low, in my opinion. They haven't really made it much lower either. Integrating RES into the main site would've been most of what they needed to get going...

They aren't going to care about what anybody on HN has to say about it because we aren't the audience they are after. They need hundreds of millions of new users and those have to come from Facebook and probably on mobile.

> and probably on mobile.

The site isn't mobile-friendly though, is it?

It's slow, bloated, and has repeated interstitials demanding you get their app if you deign to use mobile.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#357

Post by lvs »

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…

Obligatory anger for the Gmail and Calendar minimalist redesigns. This is not minimalism really. It's whitespace maximalism.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#358

Post by JoshuaDavid »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #341
nulagrithom wrote: post #182

> Users absolutely hated the new system. I feel like this is a universal absolute, doubly so when it comes to enterprise apps (the lone exception being when we switched from Lotus Notes to Gmail -- then only half the company hated the change). I would've liked to know how long the changes were in place and how it affected productivity metrics, especially the amount of training time spent on new users. As is, the arti…

He's talking about a dead tree dictionary, not a piece of software. While I largely agree with you, adding a search bar to a book isn't possible.

You can come surprisingly close with indexes and glossaries.
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