This could have been written about the redesigned user panel for gandi.net. The old one looked like Windows 95, but it was very usable. The new one seems to be made as a lifestyle site for mobile users on the go. So not me. I emailed them my concerns, as a good customer and citizen. Didn't get a response, why would they bother? So I voted with my wallet and migrated all my domains.
Whitespace killed an enterprise app
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Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#72One 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…
What made you switch to development?
The industry I worked in was networking (data center products, routers for ISPs, etc), but technical support. I did that for 20 years.
Even though it was pretty high end stuff.... everyone hates technical support and I found that generally companies eventually devalue it as time goes on. I got tired of that system.
I got paid really well but just got tired of seeing the atmosphere at company after company get more negative. Poor management trotted in, just coasting, incapable of making changes and such. Despite bringing in massive $$$ in support contracts... that money was never directed to support and things just degrade over time.
Then companies would outsource to some garbage company and the support there would be terrible so I and others would take the brunt of angry customers. Then someone would roll out metrics that show those folks overseas who just close cases are doing great because ... they just close cases without solving the issue.
The bad stuff just snowballs and there is no going back no matter how valuable you are in support.
When I was in support I worked closely with the engineering teams who wrote the code and who really liked how I worked (they'd ask that difficult cases be transferred to me because they know I'd document things, actually troubleshot, be honest if I don't know). They actually picked me at one point to be able to fast track issues that I saw straight to engineering and they'd pick up the phone immediately, because if I told them "you're gonna see this soon (either from a VP or something) because it is bad, you want to get a head start on it" they knew it was real. So I was already curious about coding in some form.
I wanted to do something new, got laid off after an acquisition, got a severance, and went the bootcamp route. I like making things now and web development is fun for me, I find that "troubleshooting" and "debugging" and such are all the same thing and that has served me well as well as the ability to work independently and learn independently.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#73It 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…
Not often that you hear Visual Studio described as "minimalistic"!
Thank god it isn’t. They sort of tried to do that with 2010 but failed
miserably.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#74Earlier 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…
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 :)
Yes, I often open a document and decide I want to use a Tool. ;)
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-mar...
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#75There is a certain irony in reading about wasted screen space on Medium. That uncloseable banner on the bottom is driving me a bit crazy.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#76Hallelujah. 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.
I tried the new interface, and even after a couple of minutes I still couldn't find where my saved posts were. Went straight back to `old.`
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#77Hallelujah. 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.
That’s the strange thing about reddit’s new design: It not only lacks functionality and performance, but also white space and clean aesthetics. It feels dated already.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#78> See where you might reduce visual complexity by combining elements — for example, by putting a customer’s first and last name in the same field.
Great, until people want to sort/filter by stuff that is now crammed in to one field. Sort by state? Sorry - it's now "city/state/country/postalcode"
Some people will want things one way, some will want it another, and you'll be tasked with making it work "both ways" - just add a checkbox to check to switch how it works. How hard can it be, right?
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#79The author writes a solid article, makes good points, then blows the conclusion.
It's not "function over form, always"
It's function with form, always. They're properly inseparable when building a product. They aren't separate things such that one should ever be over another, or that one should ever suffer to the other. You consider the product and match the function and form together to that product's needs.
It should never be function over form, or form over function. They work together in unison to be one: simpatico. The function isn't separate from the form, the form isn't separate from the function. The necessary end result product can only exist with both, as such they necessarily inform and cooperate with each other at all times.
The flawed approach described in the article, was form over function, which is the identical conceptual mistake to function over form. It's the mistake of ever considering the two to be separate or to ever elevating one over the other.
If a high density information presentation approach is the best form, that's not function over form. That's the proper form for the function of the product. That means the two are working together - neither is elevated - to deliver the best combined form + function for the product in question and its specific needs.
Re: Whitespace killed an enterprise app
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Because you know something about UX.
Good design is a cross-disciplinary activity, mixing the domain knowledge in users' heads with the design knowledge in the heads of developers/designers. This is hard to do well, with few hard-and-fast rules, but it often benefits from collaboration.
There are often big a-ha! wins when you're watching a user and ask a question like "why did you do that that way?" or "what if I redesigned it like this?" Users often can't ask those questions because they're focused on doing their job rather than the meta-job of improving it. They often don't realize what's possible.
That's no excuse for ignoring their suggestions, and unfortunately many users have been specifically discouraged from thinking how to improve their own experiences by developers who were lazy, incompetent, or merely bureaucracy-laden. But fostering a collaborative environment, where developers learn something about the domain and users learn something about how their tools are created, can lead to much better user experiences than either could do alone.