4 ms·

Do you work in a grey office with grey carpets and grey desks? Aesthetics matter. Make software that is beautiful and a joy to use.

cm2187 7y ago
Honestly when I work, I focus on the content. Bloomberg Terminals command based UI is a designer’s nightmare, but you get anywhere you want to go in a few keystrokes, and as far as I can tell, most other users love it too.
- achow 7y ago
  Most existing and trained users love it. I have heard same argument for command line interface in yester years, why switch to Graphical User Interface, when CLI is so much more faster and I love it (and so do my other friends around me). Attrition (so new employees), interns, fresh campus hires, I guess does not happen in that universe.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    No it's not that bad, it has auto-complete, it has search functionalities for both commands and data, and there has been a help button to chat with a bloomberg support person for as long as I have been in this industry.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  The Bloomberg terminal does two things which make it much more approachable for beginners than you suggest. Don't know which function you need to do something? Type in what you want (and possibly hit HELP if it doesn't autocomplete for you) and you'll find it 9 times out of 10. The 1 time out of 10 that doesn't work, you start a chat with support and they'll point you in the right direction pretty well immediately. The one slightly annoying thing is that for a lot of things there are at least 5 different ways to do the same thing/5 different screens with very similar functionality, and everyone seems to use a different one. But it's also worth saying it's a tool specifically aimed at specialists - it's not going to hold back on giving you a huge number of options over which data you want and how you want it presented, and it's not going to warn you that some data might be incomplete or not the one 'everyone' uses.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    Agree with all of this. But the color scheme, screens that distort when resized, US date formats shown to European users, text based graphics, textual commands, etc, would make more than one graphic designer physically sick.
jakobegger 7y ago
> Aesthetics matter. Everyone seems to think that, and then they produce software that looks beautiful and is horrible to use. Gray buttons and scrollbars at least make it obvious which part of the UI you can click!
hyperman1 7y ago
The book Peopleware had a section about this subject. In one study after another, workers failed to give much weight to decor in choosing, for instance, among variously colored panels and fixtures. But then: If you ask specifically about noise, privacy and table and counter space, though, [...] matter a lot. The whole thing about both office space and software is: design matters in the aspects where it gets work done. After that, nobody cares. Your working environment should help you, support you, and then get out of your way. This corresponds with my personal experience: the win95-ish software design was my peak for daily productivity. Besides, you generally get a main window with grey widgets and colored icons at the sides, and a white working area full of colored items. So the end result isn`t all that boring. https://books.google.be/books?id=TVQUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA74&ots=O_P0gIma2U&dq=peopleware%20glitzy%20office%20space&hl=nl&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q=peopleware%20glitzy%20office%20space&f=false https://books.google.be/books?id=TVQUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA74&ots=O...
ptx 7y ago
Beautiful visual design is not necessarily correlated with beautiful functional design (i.e. being a joy to use, or - as the parent post put it - simple, fast and intuitive). I think the latter is more important for a lot of software (especially software you use every day in your work) but often sacrificed for the former.
zwaps 7y ago
First, software should be efficient to use. Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use. Are forms today better than they used to be? I don't think so. Most "web based" or "web inspired" apps today are slow, unintuitive, and have idiosyncratic behavior. How often have you had a form that didn't work right because some Javascript request failed and/or it decided your entry wasn't correct? How often did tabbing through fields actually work as you expected? While your statement is technically correct, it leads to software that just isn't a joy to use. We get used to having bad usability, and we take for granted that forms just don't work 100% and so we take the safe route - for example writing long text in an editor and copy-and-pasting to be sure. Have you never done this? Having beautiful interfaces is nice, but it should be an afterthought and not a priority. Because it is difficult to optimize everything at the same time, and beauty is lexicographically unimportant compared to efficiency.

cm2187 7y ago

Honestly when I work, I focus on the content. Bloomberg Terminals command based UI is a designer’s nightmare, but you get anywhere you want to go in a few keystrokes, and as far as I can tell, most other users love it too.

achow 7y ago
Most existing and trained users love it. I have heard same argument for command line interface in yester years, why switch to Graphical User Interface, when CLI is so much more faster and I love it (and so do my other friends around me). Attrition (so new employees), interns, fresh campus hires, I guess does not happen in that universe.
- cm2187 7y ago
  No it's not that bad, it has auto-complete, it has search functionalities for both commands and data, and there has been a help button to chat with a bloomberg support person for as long as I have been in this industry.
tomatocracy 7y ago
The Bloomberg terminal does two things which make it much more approachable for beginners than you suggest. Don't know which function you need to do something? Type in what you want (and possibly hit HELP if it doesn't autocomplete for you) and you'll find it 9 times out of 10. The 1 time out of 10 that doesn't work, you start a chat with support and they'll point you in the right direction pretty well immediately. The one slightly annoying thing is that for a lot of things there are at least 5 different ways to do the same thing/5 different screens with very similar functionality, and everyone seems to use a different one. But it's also worth saying it's a tool specifically aimed at specialists - it's not going to hold back on giving you a huge number of options over which data you want and how you want it presented, and it's not going to warn you that some data might be incomplete or not the one 'everyone' uses.
- cm2187 7y ago
  Agree with all of this. But the color scheme, screens that distort when resized, US date formats shown to European users, text based graphics, textual commands, etc, would make more than one graphic designer physically sick.

jakobegger 7y ago

> Aesthetics matter. Everyone seems to think that, and then they produce software that looks beautiful and is horrible to use. Gray buttons and scrollbars at least make it obvious which part of the UI you can click!

hyperman1 7y ago

The book Peopleware had a section about this subject. In one study after another, workers failed to give much weight to decor in choosing, for instance, among variously colored panels and fixtures. But then: If you ask specifically about noise, privacy and table and counter space, though, [...] matter a lot. The whole thing about both office space and software is: design matters in the aspects where it gets work done. After that, nobody cares. Your working environment should help you, support you, and then get out of your way. This corresponds with my personal experience: the win95-ish software design was my peak for daily productivity. Besides, you generally get a main window with grey widgets and colored icons at the sides, and a white working area full of colored items. So the end result isn`t all that boring. https://books.google.be/books?id=TVQUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA74&ots=O_P0gIma2U&dq=peopleware%20glitzy%20office%20space&hl=nl&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q=peopleware%20glitzy%20office%20space&f=false https://books.google.be/books?id=TVQUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA74&ots=O...

ptx 7y ago

Beautiful visual design is not necessarily correlated with beautiful functional design (i.e. being a joy to use, or - as the parent post put it - simple, fast and intuitive). I think the latter is more important for a lot of software (especially software you use every day in your work) but often sacrificed for the former.

zwaps 7y ago

First, software should be efficient to use. Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use. Are forms today better than they used to be? I don't think so. Most "web based" or "web inspired" apps today are slow, unintuitive, and have idiosyncratic behavior. How often have you had a form that didn't work right because some Javascript request failed and/or it decided your entry wasn't correct? How often did tabbing through fields actually work as you expected? While your statement is technically correct, it leads to software that just isn't a joy to use. We get used to having bad usability, and we take for granted that forms just don't work 100% and so we take the safe route - for example writing long text in an editor and copy-and-pasting to be sure. Have you never done this? Having beautiful interfaces is nice, but it should be an afterthought and not a priority. Because it is difficult to optimize everything at the same time, and beauty is lexicographically unimportant compared to efficiency.