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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#391

Post by TeMPOraL »

thirdsun wrote: post #382
tabtab wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't really need much white space. Use thick lines to show boundaries. They do the job of visually segregating things without wasting screen real-estate. White-space became a "thing" because of the increased use of touch-screens, such as iPads and smartphones. The space helps avoid fingering mistakes. However, if the vast majority of users are using a keyboard and mouse, it's an anti-feature. People started…

White space has its purpose - grouping and the principle of proximity comes to mind. Of course this argument comes down to how much white space is appropriate and we may actually agree, but if you're indicating that the whole idea of white space, and other Gestalt principles, is a fad, I think you're wrong.

I think GP is just saying that white space is not the only way to apply Gestalt principles. There's hardly a clearer indication of which things belong together than surrounding them with a border.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#392

Post by adrianN »

Moru wrote: post #380
ioddly wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why have one interface if, for twice the money, you can have two?

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#393

Post by nprateem »

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 this is a big factor in what killed slashdot

For me it was the pedantic, toxic community. HN is a breath of fresh air by comparison.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#394

Post by thaumasiotes »

godelski wrote: post #318
folkrav wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably it : any two letter combination seems to work.

Testing it out I found something interesting. You can put in subreddit.reddit.com and it redirects to reddit.com/r/subreddit. But any 2 char prefix works sends to old.reddit.com (a.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/a) e.g. hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews Why does this subreddit exist?

> hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews

> Why does this subreddit exist?

Considering the prevalence of the rebuke "HN is not reddit" on HN, probably for people who want to talk in a more reddit-like style.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#395

Post by stormking »

duxup wrote: post #28
fermienrico wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Bloomberg Terminal? Thousands of people stare at BT all day long full of dense information. You can attest to its success by the fact that it is the defacto standard in financial analysis. Bloomberg could make it "modern" full of whitespace but they deliberately don't. Dense contextual information in my view is better than whitespace decorated vomit that we see in today's UX/UI trends.

I'll go back to saying it depends on use case. The folks staring at Bloomberg Terminal want all that data. If it was a website and I just wanted to get one chunk of data, change one setting, might be a pain.

And that's the main problem. Today's designers don't differentiate between websites and "serious" applications.

A website must be easy to navigate without any training because it's one of several hundred that the user visits each week. Any learnings are forgotten anyway on the next visit. So it has to be completely self-explanatory.

A "serious" application on the other side is used for several hours every day. Efficiency beats simplicity in that case because that three-day crash course a user might need in the beginning is neglectable in comparison to just five minutes of saved time per session on later use.

But most UX designers these days only seem to know casual, consumer-oriented - and then try to apply the same recipes to enterprise apps. It's almost always a disaster.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#396

Post by Theodores »

duxup wrote: post #8

One point: >Are there things my users really don’t need to see right now? If you don’t know, ask! ASK! ASK! ASK! For the love of god please ask your users. I worked for a company with a big clunky enterprise app. It got redesigned numerous times and rolled out with big fanfare. Nobody who used for any significant amount of time was involved in any of the redesigns. It was horrible every time with numerous changes jus…

Not just ask, work with them. Try doing their job for the day.

The article has an example of customer records where the name fields are merged, same with the address fields. I know that would be hell for my friends in customer service wanting to find a customer by postcode or just their first or last name. Sometimes people are insistent they have complained before and you have ignored them, or you get scam artists. In these scenarios the team have to do detective work and they rely on having a decent sortable grid of customer records so they can find what they want if given incomplete information. Incomplete information comes from telephone messages made by cover staff, poor quality handwriting and a multitude of other sources. Since the staff stare at the same screen all day they know their way around it and simplifying the layout helps nobody.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#397

Post by IshKebab »

mruts wrote: post #257
IshKebab wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I was talking to the Bloomberg people at a conference and parts of the terminal are web based now. Also how are monospaced fonts "the right decision"?

For the same reason that monospaced fonts are the correct choice for code: so text can line up. If you you’ve used the terminal, it displays structured information really nicely because of this. Also in regards to the monospaced fonts, you can easily calculate how much space a block of text will take on the screen. They do have the Bloomberg anywhere portal which is web-based, but the main app isn’t web based.

> the main app isn’t web based.

Source? I heard this from the developers directly.

> For the same reason that monospaced fonts are the correct choice for code: so text can line up.

This isn't a requirement for code. Coding in variable width fonts actually works fine.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#398

Post by c3534l »

Mindwipe wrote: post #91
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…

Also worth noting - consumer app or website designs that cram negative space everywhere are almost always slow as shit to use compared to their older "ugly" replacements. The way new Reddit renders content is an excellent case in point. An older example is the Guardian website - it's design about four or five years ago was despised by users (which was ignored) because it was slow and made using the site slower.

Reddit also fails to load aporoximately 20% of the time, too. I figured it was growing pains, but they've not changed a thing. They designed it, they're done, and they're really not interested in what the users think.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#399

Post by richjdsmith »

SlightRespect wrote: post #64
danielvaughn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Wikipedia would make this list as well.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#400

Post by barrystaes »

lqet wrote: post #322
crooked-v wrote: post #221

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…

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

I strongly disagree. Perhaps if you dont really have a problem that needs React to solve it. I understand you already had extensive expertise solving this problem in JS without React et all.

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