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An experiment in UI density created with Svelte

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Re: An experiment in UI density created with Svelte

#42

Post by gala8y »

klaussilveira wrote: post #36
solardev wrote: post #31

This a flashback to the DOS era for me, or CLI utils like 'top'. I can't quite express why, but I find it a bit ugly and vaguely annoying. Probably reminds me too much of unstyled spreadsheets, or maybe I've just been brainwashed by modern trends... Regardless, I guess my primary gripe with it is the cognitive overload. A bunch of numbers (stocks? not sure) and names that all look the same, sometimes with different c…

You are thinking about this from a end-user perspective, not a power user. It's the difference between eToro and Active Trader Pro. Or Fidelity's own app and their Active Trader Pro. There's is no right and wrong, they just target different audiences with different priorities. That's why we like btop and htop, but a normal PC user wouldn't understand anything.

This complexity also shows in 3d software. I love all these UIs like 3dmax, SoftImage (!), Blender, Lightwave. Creating 3d has so many aspects to it and it shows in complexity of these UIs. Generally speaking, I much prefer being able to click one of many things shown on the screen than clicking through endless sub-menus, which was always a waste of time for me.

Re: An experiment in UI density created with Svelte

#45

Post by solardev »

klaussilveira wrote: post #36
solardev wrote: post #31

This a flashback to the DOS era for me, or CLI utils like 'top'. I can't quite express why, but I find it a bit ugly and vaguely annoying. Probably reminds me too much of unstyled spreadsheets, or maybe I've just been brainwashed by modern trends... Regardless, I guess my primary gripe with it is the cognitive overload. A bunch of numbers (stocks? not sure) and names that all look the same, sometimes with different c…

You are thinking about this from a end-user perspective, not a power user. It's the difference between eToro and Active Trader Pro. Or Fidelity's own app and their Active Trader Pro. There's is no right and wrong, they just target different audiences with different priorities. That's why we like btop and htop, but a normal PC user wouldn't understand anything.

I'm not familiar with the UI of financial software, sorry. But can I ask what a power user in your example would be looking for in a screen like this? Like are they watching the screen for movement, color, ordering, something else...?

The most similar things I've worked on were dashboards and spreadsheets, but in those cases, we put a lot of thought into information hierarchy and organization, not just flat density.

For example, we'd hide what we could behind traffic status lights ; if all systems were green, you're good, and you'd only need to dig deeper into ones outside the norm that were yellow or red.

Or where the metric itself is important and shouldn't be hidden, we'd still try to highlight changes over time with sparklines or conditional color scales.

Basically just try to guide the report viewer's attention towards the most important things, whether it's "this is broken!" or "whoa, this number changed a lot over the last 24 hours".

Even in a spreadsheet, there'd be sparklines and cell formatting and subtotals and totals and such to highlight the important stuff.

I can't think of a situation where I'd want to see a bunch of peer numbers like this with no hierarchy. I'm not really comparing them against each other, am I, but probably trying to see change over time...?

But anyway, I honestly don't know (and am curious about) how this works in the financial sector. Are traders really just manually looking at all these numbers all the time (and doing what with them, trying to remember what they were some time ago?)?

Re: An experiment in UI density created with Svelte

#47

Post by yazzku »

ctippett wrote: post #37

On mobile, if I zoom out to 85% everything gets smaller and more things fit on the screen (great!). Zooming out further to 75% makes everything larger... 50% and things get larger still (more so than they were at their default size at 100%). The layout works remarkably well on mobile regardless, but I wasn't expecting such unintuitive zoom behaviour.

I've seen this behaviour on other web pages too, and it also occurs on desktop. A mystery of life.
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