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Whitespace killed an enterprise app

uxdesign.cc

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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#431

Post by jmcqk6 »

nafey wrote: post #131
SlightRespect wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to forget amazon.com. I am actually in awe of their boldness in completely ignoring UI design trends.

Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#432

Post by pantalaimon »

shakna wrote: post #356
criddell wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an old mobile interface which is very quick and also easy to use.

https://i.reddit.com/

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#433

Post by will_pseudonym »

manyxcxi wrote: post #407
will_pseudonym wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loved the story. I'm studying (mainly web) software development right now, but this type of work is what I enjoy most. Studying & understanding users' workflow and building a solution that does exactly what they need. Do you have any tips/ideas on how can I pursue this as a career?

Contact is in the profile, reach out and I’ll make the time.

Thank you! Your profile only has your Twitter handle, and I tweeted @you last night - https://twitter.com/willediger/status/1095901887537315840

I also added my email to my HN profile.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#434

Post by nine_k »

nerpderp82 wrote: post #364
guelo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has purposefully broken their search and navigation, but probably in an anti-consumer metric-driven way instead of designer-driven.

Ebay is the pinnacle of broken search and navigation! They should be winning awards, industry accolades, Webbies, the works!

I find eBay search pretty fine for my purposes. They could allow for more fine-gained structured descriptions, though.

Amazon search is in comparison much more... approximate.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#435

Post by nine_k »

dfxm12 wrote: post #417
SlightRespect wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. I wouldn't call the CL UI ugly. It's certainly not beautiful, but I'm not sure how it could be described as ugly. There's something in between, right?

It's not aesthetically polished, but it's well though-out. So it works.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#436

Post by hnick »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #232
richardcrossley wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the Bloomberg Terminal style. I watched one of my users retrieve some product information yesterday, a few key presses and it was there. Much faster than a web application. 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, yell…

Actually orange is the oldest. The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course). Everyone else used green so they went with orange to be distinctive.

Green and orange? You just gave me a flashback to my 1980s school experience in Australia with MicroBee computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#438

Post by oblio »

int_19h wrote: post #350
maxxxxx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how they come up with the numbers but I still think that menus and toolbars were much more discoverable and faster to use than the ribbon :)

More importantly for power users, they were much more customizable.

They checked that and power users didn't customize that much. There's a lot of studies that show that power users don't customize, since customizations are not portable across PCs/systems in general.

I wasn't kidding when I said they went through a lot of numbers while designing the ribbon (I read the whole blog archive at one point).

On top of that, the new UI is way more discoverable for new and intermediate users. And at the end of the day, beginners are let's say 10% of the users, intermediate users at various levels are probably something like 85% and power users are probably only 5% ;)

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#439

Post by turok »

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 use "old.reddit.com" exclusively too, information density is king.

Material design and minimalism probably have a lot of strong theory behind them, but the cargo culting around them often leads to worse UX. I think a lot of companies reach the "dedicated UX team/person" stage before the "careful A B testing of user flow" stage.

Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app

#440

Post by dqv »

mruts wrote: post #151
dqv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are custom keyboards, they're just hard to find. The Devlin KMX-144 or the Logic Controls LK1800 come to mind. I'm sure there are others. You can use (n?)curses to make a terminal user interface. I still prefer the web - just with the keyboard as a first class citizen.

I don’t think webapps can ever make the keyboard a first class citizen. The browser already has a bunch of keybindings. Personally, I’ve never used a web app that I actually liked or trusted. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always worried the page will time out or refresh or something. Like imagine emacs or vim in a browser window, it would be horrible!

I wasn't going to mention qutebrowser[0] since I didn't think it was relevant, but it works well. Most of the keys in the browser can actually be rebound. With keyboards like I mentioned, the additional keys can be mapped to special key combos like `Alt+Shift+D` to avoid collisions.

It's also possible to map most or all of Chrome's (not sure about other browsers - but we're talking within the enterprise) keys can be rebound. Check out keycode.info - every key even ones like `Alt+D` and F1 and even `Ctrl+R` can be rebound and prevented from doing their normal function in place of something else!

[0]:https://www.qutebrowser.org/

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