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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

371–380 of 445 posts

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh wow, I stand corrected. I always thought it was 10 years old because I discovered it around 2008. Sheesh.

Remember Windows XP? Fun fact: we're further away from its first release (2001), than it was from Windows 1.0 (1985). Remember Windows 7? We're further away from its first release (2009), than it was from XP.

Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#372

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.

You're right. It's like when people lump IT and Software Engineers together. I should have said UI.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#373

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 can argue more apps killed by grumpy unmotivated developers than whitespace leaving designers.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#374

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.

> so much better

In particular, faster.

I need to have a supercomputer to scroll past the first few pages.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify. These days it's so hard to organise or browse your own music collection.

I haven't seen a web music player / library manager with good UX for a very long time.

Need a spotify for WinAmp plugin

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#376

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.

The new UI isn't all that pretty either...

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#377
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

The result was worse in pretty much every way. Graphically (whole idea was it to take out all colors from the Ui? I don't know anyone who thought the 2010 UI was a good idea), Slower, less customizable , less features (for example they removed macro recording).

It was definitely not a good showcase for WPF.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#378
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

You can have a website up and running (not just locally, but live on the Internet) within literally 5 minutes using React and Heroku, netlify, now.sh or whatever. If it takes weeks to do that, you're doing something fundamentally wrong.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#380
post #338

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 yo…

Make an optional pro interface so noobs get lured in for the prettyness and when they know what they are doing, can swith?
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