20 ms·

Whitespace killed an enterprise app

• fermienrico 8y ago
  Am I the only one like dense information? There is judicious use of whitespace (Swiss layout, Brockmann et. al) and then there is the whole material UX enchilada. I prefer Foobar2000 over Apple Music. Give me dense, logical and flat layout over 50 page long hierarchical layout full of whitespace. Whitespace is tiring when used extensively.
  • jvagner 8y ago
    For me, the latest example is Youtube Music versus Spotify. When I subscribe to channels in Youtube Music, it kills the performance of my Youtube iOS app thumbnail downloads. So, I used a nifty service (http://soundiiz.com http://soundiiz.com) to sync my artists across multiple services. I hate the idea of paying for Yet Another Service, especially because I'm paying for one (Youtube Premium) that's useless for music because Google won't respond to bug reports, but I started to spend some time in Spotify. Spotify is uglier than Youtube Music, but a thousand times more useful. Part of that is the more active community (artists that I like which have 0 followers on Youtube Music will have hundreds or thousands of followers on Spotify) and more engaging playlists, and part of it is that I was able to "get" Spotify features and navigation quicker than Youtube Music... which is still feature poor as they migrate from Play Music to Youtube Music. So, to me.. Spotify is uglier and far more useful.
  • britch 8y ago
    I feel like there's a conflation of density with bad design. A lot of good design is minimalist. I don't know if it has to be. Sometimes it makes sense to present a lot of information in a dense block
  • duxup 8y ago
    It really depends on the use case, but yeah dense can be fine. But imagine staring at Foobar2000 all day as if it is your primary work. You probabbly are looking for just some of the data most of the time and filtering the rest... so in that case maybe less would be better. On the other hand if you glance at it and want lots of data without clicks, then dense is great. But your point about "logical" is the key for dense stuff, and getting to what is "logical" can be hard.
    • fermienrico 8y ago
      Have you heard of Bloomberg Terminal? Thousands of people stare at BT all day long full of dense information. You can attest to its success by the fact that it is the defacto standard in financial analysis. Bloomberg could make it "modern" full of whitespace but they deliberately don't. Dense contextual information in my view is better than whitespace decorated vomit that we see in today's UX/UI trends.
      • duxup 8y ago
        I'll go back to saying it depends on use case. The folks staring at Bloomberg Terminal want all that data. If it was a website and I just wanted to get one chunk of data, change one setting, might be a pain.
        • stormking 8y ago
          And that's the main problem. Today's designers don't differentiate between websites and "serious" applications. A website must be easy to navigate without any training because it's one of several hundred that the user visits each week. Any learnings are forgotten anyway on the next visit. So it has to be completely self-explanatory. A "serious" application on the other side is used for several hours every day. Efficiency beats simplicity in that case because that three-day crash course a user might need in the beginning is neglectable in comparison to just five minutes of saved time per session on later use. But most UX designers these days only seem to know casual, consumer-oriented - and then try to apply the same recipes to enterprise apps. It's almost always a disaster.
    • manigandham 8y ago
      People are already naturally good at filtering out irrelevant information automatically. We do this all day as we take in data and focus on what we want. So a dense UI can be naturally worked with while a lean UI offers no alternative.
  • Tepix 8y ago
    The learning curve is much steeper with a dense interface. So if you only use a software occasionally you may be better off with a friendly looking interface that hides stuff from you unless you need it.
    • fermienrico 8y ago
      You make a really good point. Checking into a flight should not be buried into some dense corner of the website. Users need to do that in one click and not very often. A retail POS UI that's used daily should be optimized for dense logical layout at the expense of learning curve.
  • Mindwipe 8y ago
    Whitespace is toxic in design. As a trend I can't wait for it to die in fire.
    • beaconstudios 8y ago
      it's a tool. As with many tools in our industry it has acquired hype, leading it to be used in situations where it isn't appropriate. That doesn't detract from the fact that there are appropriate cases for it.
    • frosted-flakes 8y ago
      Too much white space is bad. White space is not a trend. That's like saying colour is a trend. Proper use of white space is an essential part of good design. But when there's so much space between elements on a page that it shoots the page height to the moon, that's bad.
• oneeyedpigeon 8y ago
  There really needs to be a different term for 'visual' white space and \s+. I can't be the only one who was expecting a tale of python/makefile woes.
• hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  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 difficult to easily browse comment threads and see quality comments. Similarly, despite the old Reddit interface having a reputation as being "ugly", I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.
  • tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    God yes, the older reddit interface was so much better. I don't give a shit how pretty the UI is.
    • duxup 8y ago
      I use ud.reddit.com Although anytime I mention this I fear they'll take it away...
      • stronglikedan 8y ago
        Just out of curiosity, why "ud"? It seems like any two letter subdomain works in the same way.
        • duxup 8y ago
          Honestly, I think that was just one I bookmarked at some point and there it is in my history ;)
          • lessclue 8y ago
            It's actually old.reddit.com but they probably have some sort of a wildcard rule.
• sodosopa 8y ago
  This 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.
  • jaredwiener 8y ago
    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.
    • boudin 8y ago
      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.
• duxup 8y ago
  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 just to get it not to be a huge pain point.... and then a new overhaul would come again. I changed jobs to web development recently and really the first questions are to define the problems we're solving, and find out from folks using it day to day what their pain points are and how they work. I'll make some mvp type stuff for say a given function and then show them and get more feedback, the important thing is to get it from the end user, not their boss, not their VP, but the end user (boss and VP have to be involved too of course, just in other ways, distract them with fun control panels and such....). I ended up working for a very small company, handful of people, me and one senior programmer, the product doesn't dominate the market but time and again customers just love that we call, ask, and do stuff and don't dictate how they work (within reason). You can still make things clean, but when removing things you have to ask, communicate, you'd be surprised how much you can change if it is part of a conversation, and how little you can change if you just force it on them.
  • varikin 8y ago
    > 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.
    • duxup 8y ago
      I probabbly didn't emphasize it enough but yeah you give them something mvp like and watch them and get feed back on it. Recently, I actually forgot to make a whole series of changes on a dashboard that were requested. They hated the old version .... but I didn't change it before the next meeting ... and then they loved it at the recent meeting. It was the same one they hated on. Sometimes you also just have to let them get used to it too ;) It's an iterative process no doubt, but as a dev... I'm no better at knowing what I'll do too. Iv'e worked something up and weeks later changed it completely after I've used it.
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  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 productivity.
  • oblio 8y ago
    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-of-the-new-ui-part-1-2/ 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 studies, had focus groups and the whole thing (Office after all, is a major business to them, worth billions of dollars). The end result was demonstrably better for the vast majority of users (Microsoft had hard numbers to back their design decisions). And yet if you read many of the comments on tech forums you'd think Microsoft killed the users' puppies.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      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 :)
      • oblio 8y ago
        QED. I rest my case :) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-deep-thought-why-the-ui-part-6-2/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/31/inside-d...
      • lozenge 8y ago
        Yes, I often open a document and decide I want to use a Tool. ;) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-market-of-functionality/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/01/31/flea-mar...
• dictum 8y ago
  I feel like the author really wanted a scapegoat for a process that was flawed from the start (redesigning a product without research, empathy with users, feedback, gradual introduction with small test groups etc.) Too often I see UX issues blamed on visual choices — the whole everything must be flat movement of 2013-2018 is one example — when there are deeper issues that can't be extracted into a pithy recommendation.
  • thirdsun 8y ago
    Exactly. Proper white spacing shouldn’t be the problem of any redesign. Also consider that users often have a tendency to rebel against change. Habits and routines are hard to overcome and the actual might be that features and data simply aren’t in the same place they used to be, regardless of if that new location is much more reasonable. I saw it again and again: Users memorize hard-coded paths to certain functions - simply changing the name, appearance or position of certain elements along that path was enough to throw them completely off the track.
    • tabtab 8y ago
      No, you don't really need much white space. Use thick lines to show boundaries. They do the job of visually segregating things without wasting screen real-estate. White-space became a "thing" because of the increased use of touch-screens, such as iPads and smartphones. The space helps avoid fingering mistakes. However, if the vast majority of users are using a keyboard and mouse, it's an anti-feature. People started copying the trend without thinking about and road-testing the practicalities of it. Unlike the Kardashians, science works.
      • thirdsun 8y ago
        White space has its purpose - grouping and the principle of proximity comes to mind. Of course this argument comes down to how much white space is appropriate and we may actually agree, but if you're indicating that the whole idea of white space, and other Gestalt principles, is a fad, I think you're wrong.
• savrajsingh 8y ago
  Sounds like a classic “throw it over the wall” redesign without getting input on how users experience the current application. Great recommendations in the article though — loved the address readability example.
• gk1 8y ago
  Please 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 the detail page to load, 2) click on the category, 3) click "Change Category" and wait for the dropdown to load, 4) click on the new category, wait for it to apply, 5) click "Save", 6) click "Back to expenses." And every interaction takes a second or two to register, so imagine a delay between every step. Now imagine doing this 50 times every month when you're doing bookkeeping. ... In the previous version this took two clicks: 1) In the expense listing screen, click on the category, a drop down instantly appears, 2) click on the new category, it instantly applies. They also took away the feature to add an accountant to your account. Imagine if GitHub took away the option to add "member" users.
  • alex_c 8y ago
    They re-added the accountant feature recently. I imagine they received major pushback on that change.
    • gk1 8y ago
      I heard. Too late, though. They still have a long way to go with making the UX/UI useful again.
      • alex_c 8y ago
        Agreed... that’s why I spent yesterday moving all my expenses to a different system.
  • manigandham 8y ago
    Xero just did this with their Invoice section. Everything is fancy looking but has less visible data and less features with 10x more work to do the same thing. But people want Excel levels of functionality, not a brochure, and the community has been unanimous with negative feedback so maybe they'll improve while they still can.
• alex_c 8y ago
  This is exactly how I feel about FreshBooks’ redesign last(?) year. Sure, it looks a lot prettier and I assume discoverability is better for first time users, but it feels overly dumbed down, information density is much lower, and common tasks take longer with more friction. There is always some resistance to change at first, but over time I’ve only grown more frustrated with it rather than getting used to it, to the point where I’m starting to evaluate alternatives now.
• sccxy 8y ago
  It is very common problem for UX experts who haven't worked on big enterprise/data-rich applications before.
• rossdavidh 8y ago
  For every case where there is excessive whitespace, I see 10x where there is way too much clutter, and not a single place where one can click (for example, to bring the browser's window back into focus) without activating something. This sounds like a problem of not talking to your users enough, not a problem of too much whitespace.
  • nottorp 8y ago
    Click? Those people don't have time to click, they use the keyboard.
• gdgtfiend 8y ago
  In my opinion the lesson to be learned here is not design related, but requirements related. Gather your requirements from your users before you implement a change, otherwise you're just working off of assumptions, and that's just bad practice. If you have Product Management the failure was on them for not driving the customer need. Also, this is not me just scapegoating PM... it's actually what I do
• jasode 8y ago
  >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 and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking. This same exact story of a UI disaster happened at a Fortune 100 company I was at in 2005. They had a legacy app (think DOS character mode talking to a mainframe) for entering accounting documents. To replace it, a high-priced consulting firm installed a "web portal" technology. (Unifying a company's various enterprise applications behind a single web portal was a hot endeavor back then.) When it was rolled out, the accounting department fell behind on their work. Nobody noticed that the constant UI banner at the top of the of the web portal browser window was forcing users to always use the mouse to scroll up and down to look at information. In the old DOS system, they could just enter info from invoices quickly without even looking at the screen. But the new system broke the users' fluid familiarity. The UI disaster was so bad that the consulting company had to have their consultants come in on Saturday to help the client's workers catch up on all their data entry. Imagine an army of $150k consultants doing the work of $10/hour clerks because the web portal's UI was never really field-tested with a real-world workload! If just one UI web developer actually shadowed one of their users for a day, they would have noticed the usability problem.
  • fermienrico 8y ago
    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 and for good reasons.
    • tomaskafka 8y ago
      No. Just mimic the speed, information density, and task-centricity.
• coding123 8y ago
  After reading the comments I'm left thinking maybe everyone wants dense information. This is not just Enterprise.
• mruts 8y ago
  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 Wall St use Bloomberg on one screen, and our product on the other. Our app was probably the anti-thesis to the Bloomberg Terminal in almost everyway: “modern” design, tons of white space, a web app, making you have to log in every 30 minutes for “security”, no keybindings. I’m sure most of HN have never used the terminal, but let me give an analogy. The Bloomberg Terminal is like using Emacs or Vim, they make you feel powerful, they make you feel like a wizard. Our app was like google docs, you never felt like you were in direct control of it. You never felt like it was an extension of yourself. Unsurprisingly, even though our app was incredibly useful and provided portfolio analytics that you could only get from excel (our biggest competitor), it, and the company, was largely a failure. Instead of being worth billions, we were capped at a valuation of 200m for over 5 years. I believe completely that the company’s failure was due to our “modern” white space heavy app.
  • richardcrossley 8y ago
    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, yellow, white and black. Orange seems to have been added as well.
    • quietbritishjim 8y ago
      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.
• carlmr 8y ago
  >Use color deliberately. And think of the color blind. Especially dark red shouldn't be the only way this information is highlighted. 8% of men are the kind of red-green colorblind, where dark red and black is not easily distinguishable. If 8% of men don't see your error notifications, maybe that shouldn't be the only kind of highlighting (or choose a color that is less likely to affect so many people, like orange). >Let users export data, instead And maybe even import. I have a lot of administrative tasks I could script easily, if I had more direct access. But writing a python script using a headless browser, which breaks every time they update, doesn't sound as attractive. And a point they kind of forgot: Make it perform well. There are so many enterprise apps where you need to click a lot and wait so much time in between you start doing something else, which reduces your flow. A second point: Give people keyboard shortcuts, and make them apparent through tooltips. Your power users will highly appreciate if they can do things more quickly with the right shortcuts.
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    >Use color deliberately. And think of the color blind. Especially dark red shouldn't be the only way this information is highlighted. 8% of men are the kind of red-green colorblind, where dark red and black is not easily distinguishable. The example given in TFA is bad. Red should never be the sole indicator of an error. As you pointed out, color blindness is a thing. The example should have also put an error glyph (like an exclamation point in a triangle, or the local equivalent) next to the problematic number. Or presented it in reverse, or with an unusually thick border. Anything but color alone.
  • gsich 8y ago
    >If 8% of men don't see your error notifications, maybe that shouldn't be the only kind of highlighting (or choose a color that is less likely to affect so many people, like orange). While it is true that it's about 8% in total, there is a gradient on how red/green color blind one is.
• kwhitefoot 8y ago
  In the "Use color deliberately" paragraph the table has a column of numbers that are left justified. This makes comparing adjacent rows very awkward. The should be right justified. This is such a simple thing to get right yet it is nonetheless very common that it is done wrong.
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  Never underestimate the power of a data entry person working in a high volume organization with an app that looks like it was designed in 1975. I worked on a potential redesign of the US Navy's medical appointment booking application and the data entry rate and responsiveness of their "ancient" system was far superior to the newly proposed solution (web based).
  • protomyth 8y ago
    I've watched in amazement as a person slammed through green-screen after green-screen to enter data while the new "more productive" GUI interface took everyone 10 times as long. Worse, the damn GUI actually required a longer on-boarding period for the new employees. I miss companies like Palm that had a person who counted the taps to get something done.
  • michaelper22 8y ago
    My college, part of a larger university system, was in the first wave of campuses to switch from a hodgepodge of legacy stuff (CICS-based student info system, with other apps probably in classic ASP and ASP.Net, plus other vendor products) to PeopleSoft (Campus Solutions, HCM, Finance, etc.). The major complaints - from students, staff, and faculty alike - were about excessive pageload times and significantly more clicks to do simple things. They added huge sticky headers and layers-upon-layers of portals. Perhaps the only people happy with the migration were the Oracle sales reps.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  The real lesson here is that the company tried to save money by hiring a design agency instead of a UX designer who would have done the research to understand the end user and their needs. Had that been done then the new interface would be just as quick to use but with major improvements. Instead of modernizing they should have asked how to design a product that’s even more useful. 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.
• nate 8y ago
  A champion of data density who has a lot of thought provoking words on design is Edward Tufte: https://www.edwardtufte.com https://www.edwardtufte.com Worth a look if you aren't familiar.
  • spir 8y ago
    Came here to plug for Tufte. "What’s the lesson here?", asks the article. It seems to me the lesson is don't hire UX designers that are ignorant of basic seminal work in UX.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I literally had this discussion today at work. And then couple of weeks ago, when I suggested we drop a bunch of chartjunk on our products' graphs. And then some time earlier too. Tufte talks about minimizing "chartjunk", maximizing "data ink", and being comfortable with high information density. Charts are tools, and while they may sometimes require some amount of effort to understand, they play to humans' strengths like scanning and pattern matching. I think Tufte got this very right, and it generalizes well to user interfaces.
• leroy_masochist 8y ago
  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.
  • Tepix 8y ago
    It sounds like they weren't nearly as productive.
• Tepix 8y ago
  The local bank office used to have text terminals (ok, this is a long time ago). 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.
  • Khoth 8y ago
    Yes, terminals could be a lot faster. A major advantage that often seemed to be overlooked in the rush from terminals to web pages is that if you pressed a key that took you to the next screen, your next keypresses would be queued up and they'd go into the next screen when it was ready. So if workers were following a familiar process, there was often zero latency when changing screens because they could just start typing into the box they knew was going to appear. Web based things made this worse because you have to actually wait for the new page to load before you can start typing.
    • someguydave 8y ago
      it's even worse when you consider that modern computers are much slower than an apple 2e: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
• ThomPete 8y ago
  Its important to distinguish between apps that have super users and then apps which is really just for consumption. Super users apps might have features that if you use them once in a while it doesent matter if they are a little more cumbersome if in exchange you get a cleaner and easier to understand interface, the problem arises when clean gets to trump feature and functionality which is used all the time.
• vermooten 8y ago
  I worked at a company whose name begins with K ... exactly this happened. The 'old' UI was an ASP nightmare from the early 2000s but it contained all that the users loved. The new thing never took off, despite the CTO putting his job on the line for it. Another company had a green-screen nightmare from the 1980s replaced by some mouse-driven mofre modern UI - ditto. The users could easily naviate with arrow keys, tabs, function keys. It was FAST. The new UI, and it's even newer HTML replacement, both needed the mouse. Hard to sell and 2002 nightmare or a green-screen to a prospective client - but they LUURRRRVE a cool modern Angular UI, but the people who buy thing thing aren't the ones who have to use it.
  • scarejunba 8y ago
    What's a "green-screen" in this context? Like a terminal app old school style?
    • tingletech 8y ago
      yea, most old terminals had black and green CRTs; or black and amber. For some reason the ambers were still called "green screens".
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• PakG1 8y ago
  I'll forever be scarred by a web app I made to make the workflow in a mainframe terminal obsolete. Was so proud of what I'd done and all the theoretical productivity I had enabled (hey, I calculated the numbers, and the manager signed off on it!). But my only lasting memory of that app is that it probably didn't increase productivity as much as I thought it did when I looked at how they used it day to day, and only succeeded in giving them carpal tunnel syndrome due to all the extra mouse-clicking. The final conversation I had with those users is how their wrists were starting to hurt so much. But hey, I was moving on to another project. Hey, sorry to hear, here are some exercises for your wrists, see ya. Oh, by the way, did you ever try Powerball? Supposed to do wonders to make your wrists stronger. I try not to be so narrow-minded about app design after that. Pretty does not necessarily equal functional, useful, or value-adding. edit: In retrospect, those users grocked that terminal interface with all their key shortcuts the way a seasoned developer or sysadmin would grock emacs. Imagine forcing such a guy to use point and click instead for everything. You'd have a riot. I can't believe I didn't see it at the time. Young and naive, and now also regretful for all those people's wrists.
  • Roboprog 8y ago
    Bank tellers went through this in the 90s. You could tell when they swapped out their terminals for Windows. No more machine gun F key navigation, hello “hunt n grunt” cruising with the mouse.
    • ilikehurdles 8y ago
      This is what I’m increasingly going through with apple’s Touch Bar. Half the time I’m accidentally hitting it when I don’t mean to, and the other half of the time I have to look down, as a touch typist, to find the “button” I want.
• bachmeier 8y ago
  I'm somewhat in the minority, but I like plain html that puts the right stuff in the right place way better than an unnecessarily designed masterpiece.
  • someguydave 8y ago
    I agree, aesthetics have no place in an information processing environment. The emphasis should be on interface latency and predictability.
• jdhn 8y ago
  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.
• kareemm 8y ago
  > 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.
• sandebert 8y ago
  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.
• mrfredward 8y ago
  There is a certain irony in reading about wasted screen space on Medium. That uncloseable banner on the bottom is driving me a bit crazy.
  • arkitaip 8y ago
    If you use uBlock Origin or compatible ad blocker, you can remove most Medium nonsense across all domains by adding these filters: ##.overlay-dialog ##.overlay ##.u-fixed ##.metabar
  • ourmandave 8y ago
    Install one of the many 'click to remove element' browser plugins and then you can zap the header and footer with a couple clicks. I used to open dev tools and add the style: visibility: hidden; but that got old fast.
• lowercased 8y ago
  > 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?
  • darkpuma 8y ago
    > putting a customer’s first and last name in the same field. This can also present unexpected difficulties for people who's "first name" contains a space. It will appear as though that unified field contains their middle name too, which it might, but the customer might be using their middle name as a de facto part of their first name in systems such as on their credit card.
• adventured 8y ago
  The 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.
• codereflection 8y ago
  This reminds me that I should go back and re-read "Don't Make Me Think". So many of these things seem obvious, but only when pointed out.
• mcnichol 8y ago
  Sounds like UX failure. A large part of design is incorporating obvious workflows from non-obvious systems. User testing, iterative development, some type of strong feedback loop are all tools we leverage to combat this outcome. I understand why the title was used but it really falls short in highlighting just how critical and valuable UX is as part of the development process. It isn't just these stylish hipsters building art on storyboards which is what I am arguing your title implies....its about UX bridging the user with the developer as well ensuring their voice is not only heard but can drive the process.
• ASpring 8y ago
  The real problem here is the lack of UX Research that went into designing the new interface. All of this could have been foreseen before the design project even started. The whole point of UX research is to avoid expensive redesigns/features/products that users don't want. It is future oriented and pays for itself tenfold in avoided missteps in the product lifecycle.
• vectorEQ 8y ago
  remember a guy who worked in some fany BLUE in basic developed application for accounting on his dosbox windows xp. he wanted a new tool, he had a bunch of web apps made for him, but all the time he hit the simple fact, that page refreshes and lack of keybindings made his work incredibly tedious and slow. Made a curses implementation of his old application so he could work full speed with the exact same interface and keys. a modern implementation of his oldskool app, so he could finally ditch dosbox and windows xp for a more modern operating system. happy chap after that, he wondered why people even use web UIs for local things. funny lesson in that 'modern' doesn't mean 'fancy', just like in this case. you can modernise something and not make it fancy, that is what they wanted. this guy made it fancy, which is useless. i try to tell people (hard to hear for IT people i know) that internal applications are not 'user apps' in the same sense a website is. so they should be treated differently as well. if you would ask the users what they want before redesigning the thing they use for hours a day i'm sure such mistake can be prevented.
• motohagiography 8y ago
  Was a PM for a product that got criticism for its lack of density. When you are building a powerful tool for power users, you may need density and a lot of levers for flexibility. The consumer/enterprise distinction is huge here. As a domain expert, I was for a sparse UX that emphasized the awesome just-works power of the product. I'll never forget how one bank IT director customer said, "I just can't pay for something with this little on the screen. Can you add more stuff?" I think the key PM-fail on my part was privately scoffing to the architects afterwards that while we reduced the whites pace, we should also implement the ruby acts_as_enterprisey module to make the product seem crappier. This lack of people insight (and downside of visionary personality type attitude) pretty much summarized my limits as a PM. Real lesson for us was: enterprise users trade on demonstrating their value by performing complex work. It's job security. The stakeholders you need to close an enterprise sale include those users. If your product or UX trivializes someone's job, they are going to fight you. When they say they don't want your UX but they want your data, what they are really saying is, they don't need the problem you think you are solving solved, they are indexed on finding a way to demonstrate their value. I"m learning this the hard way now with a product that doesn't quite close the knowledge gap for non-experts, but am finding it's simplicity is undermining to the authority of experts. Solving problems and demonstrating value are very different things. It's like building a tools vs. building instruments. The UX question I need to answer is, does my product solve a problem, or help a problem solver demonstrate value? If a) then the end user is not my customer, if b) it's going to need a lot more knobs and whistles. White space isn't just white space, it represents the expression of functionality to the customer. The UX design question always takes you back to first principles, who is your customer and what do they need?
  • mruts 8y ago
    In my comment about the Bloomberg Terminal, I talked about how it, and any good software (also like Vim and Emacs) makes users feel like a wizard. People, especially enterprise banking users, want to feel powerful when using an app. Like it’s an extension of their own mind and body. If you make something that is valuable but doesn’t give the users a power trip, it will fail. This is just how people work.
• alan_n 8y ago
  I don't really agree about the merging of information (the rest is fine). In the example, what happens if you want to sort by state or zip (assuming they are sortable)? The upgrade is really just a downgrade functionality wise in that case. This is something I find happens time and time again, an app will get redesigned and lose functionality to look simpler. It might not be the case here if it doesn't need to allow sorting, but I hate that general trend/idea. There are better ways to have less crowded information (custom optional columns), that doesn't remove functionality. Also the more flexible a UI, imo, the better, so long as the flexibility does not increase complexity too much and it's obvious (if the setting for the columns is hidden in some obscure place, it's useless).
  • mcbits 8y ago
    Merging fields for display doesn't preclude sorting by the merged fields, which may or may not be trivial depending on the UI libraries being used. But if the user wants to sort by state, it's worth finding out why. Is it so they can "simply" scroll down 50 pages to the Louisiana customers in order to print out a screenshot and fax it to the Louisiana office?
    • alan_n 8y ago
      That's true, I just feel the example is a bit dangerous. It could be really good advice in one context and really bad in another. Also sorting a table is rarely more complex than filtering the data by some property, and although I avoid UI libraries, I can't think how one could get in the way.
• kaolti 8y ago
  Absolutely nothing to do with whitespace and everything to do with a broken UX workflow.
  • 20years 8y ago
    That was my thought too. "Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips!" "They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking." Sounds more like they added way more friction in the new design. Users now had to click multiple areas to fill out everything they needed which slows down work flow.
• stronglikedan 8y ago
  We use an enterprise MIS and the developers just did this very thing to us. When I reported it, they just said to decrease the zoom level in the browser. Of course, they blew me off when I asked how that reduced the ratio of whitespace to data, which leads me to believe they're in denial of the problem. Just to reiterate some sentiments already expressed here, "Spacious. Minimalist. Clean." is great for consumer/entertainment/etc. apps, but you can pry my data-density from my cold, dead hands when it comes to business apps where real work needs to get done.
• godshatter 8y ago
  I think interfaces should be constrained to match the specifications of your input devices and screens. If your users use a mouse, then dense windows with lots of check boxes and radio buttons is usable, and probably preferred. If your users might interact with fingers on a tablet or phone, then you need more space around things to make it easier on the user. I've never been a fan of trying to build one interface that works for all systems. It sounds great in theory, but in the end you are left with everything at the level best suited for the least capable system. Same goes for games, by the way. If you see I'm using a mouse and a keyboard, present me a different interface than if I'm using a controller.
  • frosted-flakes 8y ago
    What if I'm using a mouse, keyboard, and a touch screen? Like my laptop, when sometimes it's just easier to jab the screen.
• arendtio 8y ago
  I don't think the root problem is white space. Taking the dictionary example: A good dictionary doesn't display a hundred words per page. Instead, you just need a box to write down the word you search and a few lines to display the results. Plenty of space for the designer to turn white. The problem is somewhere in the process where someone creates an app without having experience with the old system and not understanding how the app is supposed to be used. It is quite common that UX designers do not have that kind of knowledge, but then they have to make sure to include people who have it (workshops, interviews, prototype testing, etc.). I am not saying that white space is always good the way it is used today, but the problem isn't a clean look. The problem is a dysfunctional design and the process that caused it.
  • frosted-flakes 8y ago
    The quote about dictionaries refers to paper dictionaries, does it not?
    • arendtio 8y ago
      Well, the paper dictionary is one implementation of a dictionary. Conceptionally, a (language) dictionary is a tool to translate words from one language to another. When you implement it, you have to take into account what you can do to make this tool as useful as possible for your user. Since traditional paper can't change what is written on it, you are a bit limited and simply write down the database in an ordered way to help the user find what he needs. On electronic screens the concept can be implemented in a better way, so doing it exactly the same way as on paper would be a bad design. So discussing a given design without looking back to the concept that should be implemented, will often bring you just to a local, but not to a global optimum.
• tabtab 8y ago
  Re: Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all! My goodness, Flintones even. The fashion chase is becoming obsessive and wasteful. As I've ranted about many times on HN, UI faddism is a huge time and resource drain and the industry should just say no or see a therapist. It sounds strange, but desktop UI's around 2000 pretty much reached the pinnacle of business UI's. The web slid us downhill with its stateless ways, unpredictable layout results, and now wasting screen space while copying touch-screen-oriented design for mouse users who don't need swollen boundaries. Use 5-pixel lines to visually segregate panels, saving you about 20 pixels of width versus white space. ("Web" pixels, not nec. actual pixels.) (The only exception is perhaps drill-down link-heavy lists/reports/charts. The web served these well.)
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    I’m convinced this happens everywhere, at almost every software company. As a developer, the most demotivating part of my job was the endless redesigns-for-the-sake-of-redesigns that kept happening. It’s ultimately what drove me away from being an individual contributor software engineer. And it’s always for goofy vague reasons: “It looks dated!” “It needs more pop!” “It’s not fresh enough!” (What are we making? Software or food?) Nobody is willing or able to prove with numbers or measurement that the old UI is bad and the new UI is better. It’s usually just the designer’s hunch! Yet if I want to change the search algorithm we are using I have to prove the new one is faster with research...
    • tabtab 8y ago
      Everyone is afraid of being "left behind" and not being able to get a job. Keeping one's resume marketable trumps being productive.
      • int_19h 8y ago
        I'm starting to look forward to the days when I can just work on old projects in semi-retirement, where all of this stuff doesn't matter, and the languages and frameworks are the ones that I grew up with. This isn't to say there's no new good stuff. The problem is that there's also all the new fads, and it's a very rare job when you can get the good without the fads.
• jrochkind1 8y ago
  > Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! I'm not sure this is about whitespace or information density. I think that users, especially users using something as part of their job on a regular basis ("enterprise"), hate change. Any change. If they know how to use the thing as part of their job now, it is very difficult to make a significant change that they won't (at least initially) say they hate and want the old thing back. Even if the change would have been liked better by more new users/customers. Even if they hated the old thing too! And aside from just change-aversion, of course, there may have been lots of knowledge/decisions about what users actually needed to do to do their jobs "encoded" in the old UX, as a result of lots of changes over time, that can be lost when creating a brand-new-from-scratch UX -- especially if you aren't doing a lot of (or any? it wasn't mentioned in the post) UX research in advance of the re-design. I think this story may be about change, without necessarily being able to conclude anything about the factors of the change/design, such as whitespace, or any other design elements. If you're doing UX design, you should be doing UX research. And not assuming any universal principles about whitespace or information density from this blog post.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    Yeah I have similar concerns about the lessons learned. Power users rely on muscle memory. Productivity is boosted by familiarity. Unless there is a great deal of turnover on the team, the thing they are familiar with is the thing they have. If you want to change that you have to come at it with respect and empathy. Fields nobody uses anymore? You can take them away but that changes tab order. So you might have to do that piecemeal or one screen at a time to give people time to adjust. UX for pros runs counter to a lot of guidelines for beginners. You’re trying to reduce the amount of attention they have to dedicate so they can go faster or juggle the feelings of the person they’re talking to. They want speed and predictability. Discovery is only for very obscure workflows. Important, yes, but not paramount. I’ve seen this even with developer tools. When someone starts yelling at a dev the conversation goes smoother when the task is straightforward. “Let me just pop in here and look... here’s your problem.”
• funkaster 8y ago
  I think that this is more of a tale of not doing proper user research. If they've done their homework, they would know what data users of the platform need at their fingertip, and they wouldn't have hide it behind clickable-collapsable UIs. My take on this: work with a PM that's really good at doing (proper) user research.
• zackham 8y ago
  This reminds me of those older systems that had a learning curve, where employees were trained in them, but they were efficient to use. Navigation was all keyboard-based, making extensive use of the function keys. You'd be talking to an employee and while they were using the system, they'd be confident and hitting all kinds of memorized keys to jump around and look up parts or orders or whatever. As those systems get replaced with more "intuitive" web-based UIs, where navigation is done with a mouse, and they are sold with the prospect that there isn't much of a learning curve, it seems there are more folks that don't get to that level of confidence and efficiency. Maybe it's due to lack of training, or the software isn't designed for efficient use, or web-based UIs tending to change more frequently, or the backend systems being less responsive and reliable... I'm not sure. But it sure feels like I encounter more people saying "well the system isn't doing what I want it to do today" or "let me just figure this out I'm not seeing it here". I like seeing software empower people, not make them feel inferior, so hopefully it's a temporary trend. Or maybe my view is just skewed through the lens of nostalgia. I hope I never see the day when grocery store checkers have to fumble through an ill thought out web-based UI...
• hindsightbias 8y ago
  If someone in the UX space wants to change the world, start a twitch stream and review websites/apps. I have several scratch-my-eyes-out sites I use every week for fodder and am sure you would never lack for suggestions.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Maybe I’ll take you up on it. Give me a list of sites you want reviewed.
• jimbobimbo 8y ago
  This quote (below) reminded me a story... “There should be a minimum amount of furniture (rules, boxes, dots, and other guide rails for traveling through the typographic space) and a maximum amount of information.” – Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style A company I know of, had rolled out major UX changes in their bug tracking system. One of the changes was complete removal of all borders on text boxes on bug entry screens. Imagine a page filled with text boxes, with not a single clue of where they are except labels above them. Users literally revolted. The change ended up becoming an option just for that company.
• billyt555 8y ago
  For any UI that has long running power users, however complicated, the users will over time memorize how the screens look and operate. It doesn't matter how 'intuitive' the redesign is because you will have broken their rote patterns - and the user has to rethink how they use the software, often at every turn. In the high paced environment of a call center this is simply untenable.
• keiferski 8y ago
  This article reminds me of Japanese web design and how dense it is. It's almost a bit like the 'western' web when Craigslist was first launched. Ultradense, kind of ugly, but extremely utilitarian. https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
• supermw 8y ago
  I see this all the time. It is a symptom of blowhard UX designers who don't understand there's a difference between mass consumer and enterprise app design. They look at a shitty looking enterprise interface and snort "I can make this so much better! Let me introduce you to Material design!" If you want to make pretty little apps that get you tons of likes on Dribbble or whatever, go make consumer apps. When it comes to enterprise apps boring is beautiful. I'm talking dense data displays, esoteric shortcuts, NO optimistic saving behaviors, etc. Everything that classical consumer app designers hate. The point of an enterprise app is all business.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Correction: UI designer. I wish developers would stop grouping them into one category, totally different fields.
    • supermw 8y ago
      You're right. It's like when people lump IT and Software Engineers together. I should have said UI.
• NearAP 8y ago
  >>>> Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips!<<<< I understand this but before agreeing to this, I think one should look at the issue of "change management". By default, people resist change. Once you get used to something, it is difficult to adapt to a new one (even if it is better). If the UI is "really bad", then it should definitely be changed but this should be done in tandem with change management (lots of training, slow cut-over to the new system, etc).
• alexbecker 8y ago
  Jira drives me nuts with this. I have a 34" monitor and with six columns in our Kanban board I can see 4, maybe 5 tickets per column. With 10 people on a team it means constant scrolling to see what people are working on. It finally pushed me over the edge to use user stylesheets. A bunch of "margin: 0 !important" and "display: none" and I get twice as much information on my screen at the cost of... looking polished I guess?
• lolsal 8y ago
  > In the above example, note the prominence of the single red highlight in the gray-themed table, thanks to the lack of other color. Each row suffers slightly in its horizontal scannability, but at the gain of increased table-wide scannability. Consider what is more important for your application. For what it's worth, I found the blue table easier to spot the red numbers. I'm red/green colorblind and I could not differentiate the red from the grey table coloring very well. With the blue it stood out.
• nulagrithom 8y ago
  > Users absolutely hated the new system. I feel like this is a universal absolute, doubly so when it comes to enterprise apps (the lone exception being when we switched from Lotus Notes to Gmail -- then only half the company hated the change). I would've liked to know how long the changes were in place and how it affected productivity metrics, especially the amount of training time spent on new users. As is, the article seems kind of obvious. Enterprise users abhor change; who knew? > Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!) This also makes me question the veracity of the article. It's a really terrible metaphor that makes me wonder if they were _solely_ concerned with pretty design on the outset. I want a dictionary that shows me 1 word per page, with a search bar. The page flipping functionality is useless and can be removed entirely. It's a bad workflow. I can definitely say that over the past 20 years, our in-house LoB app has developed some really bad workflows as well (business changes a lot over 20 years). Removing these bad workflows would give us back a ton of screen real estate without losing productivity. The causality is backwards. I don't want to create whitespace by changing the design and ruining the functionality. I want to change the functionality which will create more whitespace and allow room for beautiful design.
  • Aardwolf 8y ago
    >> Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!) > This also makes me question the veracity of the article. Personally I thought the opposite, I find it a fantastic quote from the article as it exactly describes the problem: Things that used to take a single click taking multiple clicks with slow animations between them because "design" and information not anymore visible on one page even though the human visual system is very well optimized to deal with that vs waiting for multiple screens.
  • frosted-flakes 8y ago
    He's talking about a dead tree dictionary, not a piece of software. While I largely agree with you, adding a search bar to a book isn't possible.
    • 8y ago
• AlexandrB 8y ago
  Ironically not listed as a solution: use skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphic interfaces, for all their pitfalls, are good at visually separating interface elements for quick comprehension without requiring mountains of whitespace.
• udkl 8y ago
  This is exactly the Google plus vs Facebook argument I've been making over the years. 'Plus', with all it's white spacing was arguably ugly and this was also why it had low user retention that led to it's demise.
• aroberge 8y ago
  > Are there things my users really don’t need to see right now? Yes, what about the ridiculous amount of space taken by the header and footer on that page.
• asadkn 8y ago
  Speaking of not understanding the users while redesigning, anyone remember Digg? Digg's downfall started with a redesign: https://www.fastcompany.com/1690829/digg-redesigns-loses-more-quarter-audience https://www.fastcompany.com/1690829/digg-redesigns-loses-mor...
• briandear 8y ago
  The author suggests Google’s “Material” but in my experience, Google has it wrong compared to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. For example, Google hides stuff behind icons with no text. Unless you already know the UI, you are hunting around for what you need (remember screensharing on Google Hangouts?) On Apple’s apps, icons always come with a text label and rarely are things hidden behind unnamed icons. Google also seems to be changing UI constantly. Material Design is terrible — it’s the very essence of the problems being mentioned in this article. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines also address accessibility far better than Material design. Maybe it’s me, but it does feel like there are camps when it comes to UI: the Material Design side and those that care about usability for people that don’t spend their time in the Googleverse.
  • woogiewonka 8y ago
    Google UX in general is atrocious. They keep changing the format on every product so you never know where to look. The use of dark patterns is especially horrible. I don't know if what they do is on purpose terrible, or someone just failed at their job, but Google and material design in apps is particularly bad at doing things for the user. Any time someone references Google or some other large corporation and say "see, they are doing it this way" I want to slap them.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  I think the best way to sum this up is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
• soneca 8y ago
  I am building an enterprise-y software (a 1:1 meeting app[0]) and, not being a designer or UX expert, I am taking some chances with the design. I am using a dark background and I am aiming for a design heuristic where everything of common use is reachable with scroll and 1 click. It becomes a long page the more meetings and notes you had. This does not leave much space for white space. I am also being bold on the use of colors to differentiate where the user is while among all that scrolling. I am not sure I am right in any of my choices, but this article makes me think I am on the right path. Even if we have different instances on scrolling [0] https://www.oneonemeeting.com https://www.oneonemeeting.com
  • frosted-flakes 8y ago
    Your website needs a little bit more ...ahem... whitespace. Text that is tight to the edge of the screen is unpleasant to read. Meanwhile, I glanced at a couple of the screenshots and noticed they need a lot less whitespace, especially vertically.
    • soneca 8y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. I agree with the site. I am not so sure about the less whitespace on the application. There is an "accordion" feature at those lists you saw that - I believe - fit well with taller rows. A lot of space to click is good. But maybe cutting 2px might help indeed
• Cenk 8y ago
  >Consider using monospaced numbers when comparing digits between rows matters. For the love of god don’t only consider it, actually use tabular numbers in any context where the number is not part of a sentence or something similar.
• seabird 8y ago
  Modern UI design is awful. It might work for Joe Moron, who is just scrolling through video clips and short fragments of text, but I can't imagine why you would ever try to apply design principles designed for that case to professional users. Do people really think they can take the complexity out of these inherently complex business systems? I'm not saying that everything has to look like shit, but no amount of dumbing down an interface is going to fix the fact that certain software needs to display an intimidating amount of info, and that the learning curve for that software is going to be pretty brutal. I want to wake up from this nightmare. Software like Bloomberg Terminal and CATIA doesn't need to be beautiful web apps with clean, !minimal! Material design, they need to tear through the issues they're meant to solve as quickly and easily as possible, even the reality of that is a little ugly.
  • blueboo 8y ago
    Well, let's challenge ourselves: what is the best designed (digital) interface with the deepest usability? Or some outstanding interfaces that square that circle? I'm familiar with 3d software suites, and they're (mostly) all highly-configurable, permitting custom layouts, panels, toolbars, and even enabling intermediate users to create UI tools. To your point, they're also ferociously complicated for novices. Bloomberg is a funny example. It's a well-indexed reference, rather than an expressive tool, so mastering its shortcut-dense interface is an affordable cost to professionals of modest technical sophistication. I wonder if TurboTax is in the running; for all its blandness, in 2019 it's exceedingly transparent and clear guide to doing an extremely complicated task. I hasten to acknowledge that's hardly going to be a universal belief. Maybe Gmail? But again the functionality is fairly shallow...
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Gmail is a bad example. It's way too limited, very low-density in default settings, and generally slow. Thunderbird would be better, but it's far from the peak of what's possible. If you redesigned Thunderbird around the principles of terminal or Emacs-based mail apps - in particular the keyboard-first focus and high performance, with Thunderbird's rich content rendering, then it would be much closer to e-mail perfection. 3D software suites like 3DS Max or Blender are perfect examples of software that's a tool, not a toy. The learning curve is roughly proportional to the breadth and complexity of the problem domain, so training is required, but the software itself doesn't waste your time and patience with slow and low-density UIs.
• jarym 8y ago
  Have to agree with this. Too many times I've seen UX people brought in who see the ONLY path to simplification as removing things /they/ don't perceive as necessary. They're flat out wrong - you can simplify also by using the suggestions mentioned in this article. Sometimes the strategy pays off. But for enterprise apps with high information density it often doesn't. New systems end up lacking essential features just because a few people who never needed to use the original system (and would not need to use the new one either) end up stripping things away.
• kevindong 8y ago
  Another modern web design pattern that I hate is when a website uses an excessive amount of AJAX requests. The practical effect of this behavior is that you see the UI update many, many times before the data you're looking for is actually shown. While the data is being loaded, you just see placeholders and you don't feel like you should do anything until the entire page finishes loading. For instance, when I log into the Chase website, there's 8 UI updates (i.e. 8 sets of loading bars/HTTP requests; see below) that have to load before I can see the recent transactions on my account. Each chunk of requests must finish before the following chunk can start. All in all, it takes ~7.1 seconds for the page/recent transactions to load. --- The 8 UI updates the Chase website goes through before it finishes loading/you can see your recent transactions: 1. Initial blue loading screen with a spinning loading icon 2. Tan colored background color replaces screen #1 3. Header loads 4. The blank outlines of the main UI components loads (without any data in them/with placeholder loading bars) 5. All of my Chase account metadata (account type, current balance, and last four digits of the account number) loads 6. More in-depth data of the first account on the list loads (available credit, payment due date, minimum payment due, etc.) 7. Recent transactions panel starts to load (with no data/with only a placeholder loading bar) 8. Recent transactions are shown At this point, the page is finished loading.
• ElijahLynn 8y ago
  Was there any usability testing done on this throughout the entire design process? I don’t see the word “test” in the article mentioned once. Seems like the process is what failed here. Maybe there was zero feedback loop between the creator and the consumer?
• Proven 8y ago
  I hate white space, just makes my mouse hand tired because I have to scroll 3 times as much. Awful.
• errantmind 8y ago
  I have worked with many teams at large companies where clunky applications, usually just database facades / CRUD, have been in place. In almost every case these 'database interfaces' never fully satisfy the users' needs. Instead, I have found much success in slowly deprecating these applications and, instead, giving these users direct read-only access to the database and teaching them SQL. SQL is not a tool only for 'technical' people. Most of these users have mastered the 'dark arts' of Excel so they are capable of learning other tooling. These users can then query the data in any way they want and export it in any way they want. There is more to this, like ensuring to only give them access to reporting databases. The application then can focus on being an interface for updates / writes and not for data exploration.
• xbryanx 8y ago
  I think about this every time I watch some physician friends using Epic or any Electronic Health Records system. Those things are dense as hell and packed full of data and utility. You won't see a bit of wasted space. Different problems require different solutions.
  • tlrobinson 8y ago
    > You won't see a bit of wasted space Ahem... "How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose" https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital-to-give-a-patient-38-times-his-dosage-ded7b3688558 https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital... > Do you spot the problem? Perhaps not, since it is hiding in the middle of this dense screen, (that quote is from part 2 of the series of posts) Of course that's not the only reason this incident occurred, but it likely contributed to it.
• rkho 8y ago
  > It used progressive disclosure to hide presumably insignificant information. This is the line that shocked me the most, emphasis on the word presumably. It comes off as a decision being made without any sort of objective data behind it.
• ilovecaching 8y ago
  This person has it all wrong. If there are too many nobs and too much data for a person to comprehend, then it means you need more automation. The people who complained about the GUI are the people who will probably lose their jobs in the next decade to machine learning.
• z3t4 8y ago
  There are tradeoffs when designing for first time use vs repeated use. And also between simple and powerful. Like a GUI vs a Terminal. Or keyboard shortcuts vs Menu. A user configurator vs a cad program. Or when it comes to game design - first time vs replay vs endgame. Maybe Ux designers can be inspired by games - designed for engame (multiplayer) but with campaigns with a progressive difficulty ...
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That would be great. Each game usually features its own weird UI, with unique shortcuts, half-broken controls and plenty of design experiments - and yet users don't have any problem with learning all of this. A lesson for the UX people that users aren't as dumb as it's often said.
• KaiserPro 8y ago
  The example where the author takes a row of address data and merges the columns, with the caption: "easier to scan" No, its really not. Anyone with a hint of dyslexia or similar will not forgive you for merging cells together. Its just not easier to scan. What would have made it easier? first name first.
• guelo 8y ago
  Everybody says the designer should learn the user's workflow. But for complex workflows the designer is not going to learn everything they need to know. I think the other way around is better: let the users tweak the design. UX isn't that hard to learn or understand, especially for industrial systems where aesthetics are not important.
• DenisM 8y ago
  The typical person making a purchase decision doesn't know what the app does in any detail. So if he sees less information on screen he thinks it's easier to use, as compared to more information on screen. Of course the opposite is normally true, which is where the trouble starts. It also looks similar to simple consumer apps that the decision-maker is used to. Finally the UX designer says magic words like "clean" and "simple" and "focused" and "beautiful" and the sale is made. The lesson here is to find way to counteract this. User engagement metrics would be the last line of defense. Earlier than that maybe small focus groups. But something is already lost by the time we got here - we're not on the same page wrt what is important and what are the criteria. I'm open to suggestions here.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    You are confusing UX designer with UI designer. UX designer does not use words such as clean and simple or beautiful that’s the talk of someone who does no user research which is precisely what UX designers focus on primarily.
• TimMurnaghan 8y ago
  > Look at Material’s Updates No! If you're thinking about your enterprise application like an android app then you're starting in the wrong place.
• HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  If the "UX collective" thinks that site is what user experience should be, then I think it's time for a military coup. It's really hard to read.
• jspash 8y ago
  And PLEASE don’t break the keyboard with your bespoke (buggy) reinvention of html. Specifically Ctrl-F and the back button. Oh, and <select>s. I could go on but it’ll just make me sound grumpy.
• pard68 8y ago
  I rewrote 12k Powershell application for a previous job. Thing was ugly, full of errors, but they had been using it forever. Turned it into a webapp. It didn't last three weeks. The users didn't want change. My app was able to increase speed by about 10%, management wanted it. But the guys in the call center didn't like it. Unlike the redesign in this article, I spent a year using that Powershell app and was very familiar with how it was used and its shortcomings. There is something to be said for just wanting the status quo.
• godelski 8y ago
  I think another lesson to learn is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". I think we all have used apps where we got used to one thing and then there's a UI design that changes everything. As an example that really has no major impact (but I think illustrates subtle changes), I got mad with the Android 9 update. The number one thing I was mad about was the clock placement. Every previous generation it had been placed in the upper right. Since 9 it moved to the top left (same as iPhones). Problem being that Android literally trained the userbase to look in a specific area for that feature and then moved it. Sure, I know where to look now, but I still frequently look at the top right first. Feature changes like this I don't understand. I can't understand how it would be a significant factor in converting users (which in this case the platform had majority market share) and also results in confusing (rightly so) the existing userbase. Not working in UI I see them a lot like QC (but with more work to do). If everything is working perfectly QC should have nothing to do. Just like if your UI is good then it shouldn't be changed. I don't understand this "need" to always change things. Sure, there are legit reasons to do so (just like QC NEEDS to exist (for the love of god don't get rid of QC)), but I see a lot of changes that happen that don't make things easier and appear (from the user side) to just be change for the sake of change.
• manigandham 8y ago
  This is everywhere, not just enterprise. Take a look at craigslist and how every attempt to make it "pretty" has failed. Many successful products are focused on getting things done, even if they're exceedingly ugly in doing so. There seems to be a lack of education and experience in teaching designers that UI != UX and what design really means is helping users reach goals, not just looking nice.
• kabacha 8y ago
  Oh the irony of posting this on medium. On my laptop the content is merely 30% of the screen - there's a big banner, pop up, and big footer. To boot to that 60% of width is dead white space too. I'm excited to see the death a frankenstein medium.com has become - it's completely unreadable without postprocessing extensions.
• SubiculumCode 8y ago
  The harder to scan example was easier than the east to scan example, for me.
• zapzupnz 8y ago
  White space didn't kill the app. A lack of adequate analysis, interviewing, and user testing killed it. Let's be clear about this; design trends in themselves aren't the issue, it's their improper usage.
• m463 8y ago
  Sounds like iOS 7, which threw out a lot of bathwater and babies.
• radicaldreamer 8y ago
  This is exactly what happened with the Withings app after the Nokia acquisition
• userbinator 8y ago
  Related and no doubt even as infuriating is the tendency to also decrease the contrast of UI elements by, in addition to adding copious amounts of whitespace, turning blacks into light greys. I remember one instance where an internal website was "modernised" with a new stylesheet and panicking for several minutes wondering if something was wrong with my eyes or monitor, because everything looked faded and unclear in addition to the nauseating effect of the sea of whitespace. My coworkers were just as repulsed by the change, and after confirming with the department responsible that they were not going to revert the change ("because we don't want to go back to old stuff" --- that's literally the explanation I was given), took several minutes to come up with a user stylesheet and distribute it to everyone else interested. To this day I am still astounded that more than one person thought #BFBFBF is a perfect colour for text on a white background.
  • titanomachy 8y ago
    Yikes, that's a contrast ratio of 1.84... well below the AA accessibility guideline of 4.5 from webaim.org. I personally aim for about the AAA guideline of 7 (about #595959 on a white background) since I appreciate the lower eye-strain of slightly reduced contrast. I also like having the option to go darker for emphasis. Chrome developer tools now shows you the contrast ratio along with these recommendations when you modify text colour.
    • userbinator 8y ago
      since I appreciate the lower eye-strain of slightly reduced contrast I don't understand this --- it seems to be a recent trend, but if anything, it causes more eye strain. For many years full white/black was the norm, and no one really complained. Perhaps it's because of monitors being set to max brightness/contrast by default? IMHO FFFFFF/000000 should not be uncomfortable to look at, and if it is, the brightness is probably too high.
• anigbrowl 8y ago
  The author seems to have completely missed the lesson that designers should get buy in from the people who actually use the tool, or at the very least should be required to use their own design under realistic conditions. If you just want to apply design principles and not worry about whether your work is accessible, stick to fine art. I feel no sympathy for the designer in this scenario, s/he deserved to fail.
• rkagerer 8y ago
  I'm very opinionated on this, and I can't stand the way modern UI has no respect whatsoever for my valuable pixel real estate.
• woogiewonka 8y ago
  It blows my mind that to date we have major companies who put forward horrible UX. Few come to mind off the top of my mind: Chase, PayPal, Digital Ocean. Trying to get statements from Chase is like playing ping pong. Webflow, Freshbooks, all major offenders.
• sigi45 8y ago
  Someone wasn't good in there job. UX also means to understand the user. High density data in good looking is still possible.
• atoav 8y ago
  You can get a beautiful fast and dense interface if you want one. But then you need someone to actually design it for you. Most design that happens today is actually Styling rather than design: you just slap some framework on everything select some colours, apply some layout patterns and call it a day. Maybe you “go wild“ with some minor detail and are proud for beeing a rebel. Like with architects who like to use glas and wide open spaces everywhere, regardless of social use, this is what divides really good designers from mostly ok designers. Design is not finding the same clean, minimal look for everything, but looking at every interface that has been designed (including physical interfaces) and asking the question what is appropriate. And let’s face it: sometimes your design is worse than the unstyled browser default or the “readability mode”. Design should be a lot of work, but like always you don’t pay an expert just to get it done, tou pay them for their experience, their knowlede and their ability to treat your project the way it deserves to be treated. This takes a little longer, but the iconic minimal designs everybody and their grandmother knows (Rams Braun radio for example), were 90% thought and the rest was styling and technical problems to be solved. If you have a chance, please hire someone for actually thinking about a design and critically analyzing things they try out — this is were all great usable designs come from. If it looks modern as a side effect, so be it. Give them somebody who knows all hairy technical implementation details as a side kick and you are good to go
• su8898 8y ago
  Speaking of data intensive applications, I find it really hard to design a complex UI with popular frameworks such as bootstrap/antd because of the amount of padding/white space in input/select/row/column components. Always have to adjust the CSS/LESS/SAAS/whatever to get to an optimal amount of whitespace.
• metaphor 8y ago
  > 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 challenge strikes me as less handwaving assertions of what "large business" ops is about, more understanding user needs and capturing intent with a UI that balances productivity and experience.
• lunchables 8y ago
  I think the problem stems from the responsive designs that were used to build really slick sites for marketing purposes. Everyone wants to apply the same aesthetic to what are really software applications running in your browser. These are very different things and should not follow the same design guidelines.
• Piskvorrr 8y ago
  TL;DR: 1. Design for design 2. Wilfully ignore business requirements in favor of visual groupthink 3. Feign surprise when your brand-new, byoo-tiful and oh-so-modern app is unusable, blame your tools