I find it quite telling that no major takeaway mentioned talking to users or testing the design. This reeks of genius design, which really isn't genius at all.
Whitespace killed an enterprise app
61–70 of 445 posts
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#62Please change the clickbait title. The app didn't die, they just had to revert the design change. That aside, the Freshbooks redesign last year pushed me to switch to QuickBooks for exactly this reason. The new design had the stereotypical "modern app" design, but every common task required 5x more time than before. For example, just to change the category of an expense you have to 1) click on the expense, wait for t…
They re-added the accountant feature recently. I imagine they received major pushback on that change.
I heard. Too late, though. They still have a long way to go with making the UX/UI useful again.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#63One 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…
> ASK! ASK! ASK! Except users lie all the time. They don't know what they need or want. People are horrible at being logical about what will actually help them. Watch them work. Watch a bunch of people work. Test and prototype changes and watch more people work. And watch them work at their desk or where ever they work.
> They don't know what they need or want.
If they're so deluded about what they want what makes you think you can see through that and find a solution more clearly than they can?
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#64Hallelujah. 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.
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.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#65This is where user research would have saved time and money. Rework is expensive so is slowing down staff. Usability testing would have determined this prior to launch.
It also sounds like they didnt understand the user's needs. A little user research at the beginning would have highlighted what information was needed, with the time constraints.
Indeed. Usually the number of actions to get to something or do something is a big part of UX. It becomes critical when the software is a tool used for repetitive tasks.
This sounds like a project where the users haven't been involved at all, I'm surprised it wasn't noticed earlier.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#66> What’s the lesson here?
> A large business by its nature has massive-scale data and usually thousands of users who directly interact with it—searching, manipulating, reporting, and more. They need to move through that data quickly, without a lot of digging around in the interface.
The lesson here is actually that the designer didn't understand the context in which customers were using the app.
It sounds like s/he didn't talk to customers about how and why they use the app, or show wireframes to them, or even sit and watch them use it for an hour.
If they had done any of the above, they would have had a lot more context about what a good solution looked and felt like.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#67It 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…
> It seems a lot of UIs these days are designed for beginners instead of people who know what they are doing.
I think the underlying thing is that simple UIs sell better because you're usually presenting it to someone that can't visualize their complex workflow needs up front. The number of times I've seen requirements that are basically sales enablement features that customers would rarely use is not insignificant. Similar to focusing on usability for low-res displays, when the only time the app would be used on a low res display is when hooking it up to a projector in a demo.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#68>a well-intentioned UX Designer at a large high-tech company who was given a new project: Redesign an internal control panel that was ugly [...] It lasted one month before the company was forced to retire it. Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center…
I can't believe how many times I've heard your story but in different companies. I feel like there is an opportunity to make a graphical user interface framework that mimics old terminals. Full screen apps that leverage use of the keyboard shortcuts or hell even a custom keyboard specifically made for industrial use. Basically a IBM 400 system but running on modern software stack. Airlines have stuck with their UI an…
No. Just mimic the speed, information density, and task-centricity.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#69>a well-intentioned UX Designer at a large high-tech company who was given a new project: Redesign an internal control panel that was ugly [...] It lasted one month before the company was forced to retire it. Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center…
I can't believe how many times I've heard your story but in different companies. I feel like there is an opportunity to make a graphical user interface framework that mimics old terminals. Full screen apps that leverage use of the keyboard shortcuts or hell even a custom keyboard specifically made for industrial use. Basically a IBM 400 system but running on modern software stack. Airlines have stuck with their UI an…
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.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do it, but it requires tons and tons of effort. And even after all that, you can't escape the backlash. There's a great series by Jensen Harris, Office Program Manager, about how they designed the Ribbon: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/09/26/the-why-... (you can find the rest in his blog archives, unfortunately the images are gone) It was an incredibly complex undertaking, Microsoft did many st…
This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
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.