41–50 of 445 posts
It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing. Someone’s this is OK but in a professional conetwxt it often isn’t. I can’t even imagine if IDEs like Visual Studio were designed “spacious” and “minimalistic”. It would look cute but you wouldn’t get anything done. Some things are just complex and there is no way to design that away without hurting productivit…
I see this problem all the time when I talk to companies. They hire a big agency expecting big results and the agency rolls out the red carpet and does everything they are asked. Both parties fail. The first question I ask when someone asks me to design something for them is “why?” Most of the time the response is way out of touch with the actual reason why you should ever consider design. A real UX consultant will do 70% research, 30% design if they offer that portion of the service which I do. Please don’t make the mistake of assuming you know what you need. Find a UX designer not a UI designer and listen for the hard questions- who is your customer? What problems are they complaining to you with? What do you think this redesign will do for you? These are just some of the basic questions you’ll be asked. Your consultant will know your customer better than you when they are done before they touch any designs, if they don’t do any of these things then walk away.
To be clear this is a "users didn't like the new look" story.
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…
These days it's so hard to organise or browse your own music collection.
I distinctly remember that they got much slower at getting work done when they switched to a colorful GUI.
They did not switch back to the text terminals. If you deal with processes that don't change much, it's a questionable decision.
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…
- the boss of the boss of the representative of the customer company
- the boss of the representative of the customer company
- the representative of the customer company
- my line manager's boss
- my project manager's boss
- my line manager
- my project manager
- me and my team
- the user
Any of these people might of might not have been ever in contact with the elusive "user".
Usually when I hear that something "killed an app" I think "software stopped working", not "users didn't like the new look". To be clear this is a "users didn't like the new look" story.
A great example of a really nice information dense app is the Bloomberg terminal. Maybe it’s ugly (a lot of people say this, but I personally don’t think so), but all the right design choices have been made. High Contrast, monospaced fonts, extensive keybindings, absolutely no wasted space. And, most essential, it’s not a web app. I used to work at a portfolio analytics company who’s explicit goal was: to have all of…
The colour scheme also looks good. A black background gives you many more high contrast choices. Try using yellow or cyan on a light background. It seems most of the colours are based on the old 8-bit selection; red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, white and black. Orange seems to have been added as well.