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Making this information accessible is amazing work, thank you! But, alas, it loses a lot in the UX department: 1) It's low-contrast. This makes it hard to rea

Making this information accessible is amazing work, thank you! But, alas, it loses a lot in the UX department: 1) It's low-contrast. This makes it hard to read for a lot of people, unnecessarily so. 2) It uses a font that is hard to read. Not sure if it's font rendering, or if the font is just bad, but... just a plain Sans Serif would be fine? 3) The gradient for the map is pretty much not fulfilling any function, because you can't read it with any kind of precision. You'd be better off with 4 distinct gradients. Or better, separate colors. 4) If I can nitpick: The title has 3 different font faces, with misaligned baselines. Please don't do that :)

airstrike 7y ago
Ironically, the scale legend in the chart actually uses a font that's very easy to read
vikramkr 7y ago
I wonder if the thinking was to make it deliberately uninviting and difficult like the Bloomberg terminal to make people feel cooler while using it (which is a legitimate thing - i'm not saying that glibly at all. People that master the bloomberg terminal feel like wizards which certainly contributes to lockin, and that sort of needlessly difficult UX is somehow associated with being "cool" or being like a "real command center" somehow)
- fermienrico 7y ago
  While I agree with the GP, I don't agree with the jab at Bloomberg terminal. There is nothing needless in Bloomberg terminal - it comes with a special keyboard and everything is keyboard driven. There are no animations such as the ones you see in macOS and Windows that take up 300ms. There are no distracting popups and notifications. It is probably the most incredible feat of UI/UX design...ever, perhaps airplane cockpits and nuclear power plant control rooms would rival. Just because UI is dense does not mean it is not easy to learn. Dense UI provides more information than something with 5 levels of hierarchical layouts, each screen animating with 300ms of bullshit animations. Furthermore, learning curve should be acceptable for people that truly want to use a tool on a daily basis (for e.g. emacs or vim). There is a reason why people who use Bloomberg terminal will never want anything else. Here is a video of the thought process that goes into designing just the keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE Have you used Bloomberg terminal or talked to a user? Regarding lock-in: I think its the opposite - when the users don't want to switch to anything else, that's the best a company can do. That's the kind of "lock-in" every company should aspire to.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    I've used a Bloomberg terminal and most of my social circle has as well. I guess maybe difficult isn't the right word to describe it, but definitely uninviting on purpose. And a lot of my friends get a kick out of how uninviting it looks and how much they feel like a wizard using it. Theres definitely an aspect to the way it looks unrefined that make people love it, and I guess a better way of saying it might be that trying to emulate that by making something actually inaccessible and unrefined is not going to be successful
    - fermienrico 7y ago
      I think you're attributing ugliness "on purpose" incorrectly. No one at Bloomberg exclaims "Oh gee, let's make this more ugly, people will get a kick out of it." It's just that they haven't bloated this app with CSS styles and other unnecessary aesthetics. It works. That's all.
greatwave1 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Fixed the fonts and title, I'll spend some time tonight working on the other points you brought up.
- groby_b 7y ago
  Awesome, thank you! (You still might want to align Quiver Quantitative's baseline with the rest. It's the smallest nit of them all, but it's jarring ;)
rckoepke 7y ago
Very genuinely curious, do most people consider these "UX" instead of "UI"? For me, I'd like to be able to click or at least copy/paste the titles of the studies shown on the map, e.g. when I hover over houston, I can visually read the title of the study, but I can't move my mouse to click or highlight the text, or else the box disappears. I'm very glad someone is making a dashboard that actually brings "new" information that's presented differently than other people have presented it. Lots of fairly derivative coronavirus dashboards have popped up on ShowHN over the past month or so, but this is the first along these lines.
- groby_b 7y ago
  It's probably more UI than UX, but... they're really mutually reinforcing. I'll start calling it U* ;)

airstrike 7y ago

Ironically, the scale legend in the chart actually uses a font that's very easy to read

vikramkr 7y ago

I wonder if the thinking was to make it deliberately uninviting and difficult like the Bloomberg terminal to make people feel cooler while using it (which is a legitimate thing - i'm not saying that glibly at all. People that master the bloomberg terminal feel like wizards which certainly contributes to lockin, and that sort of needlessly difficult UX is somehow associated with being "cool" or being like a "real command center" somehow)

fermienrico 7y ago
While I agree with the GP, I don't agree with the jab at Bloomberg terminal. There is nothing needless in Bloomberg terminal - it comes with a special keyboard and everything is keyboard driven. There are no animations such as the ones you see in macOS and Windows that take up 300ms. There are no distracting popups and notifications. It is probably the most incredible feat of UI/UX design...ever, perhaps airplane cockpits and nuclear power plant control rooms would rival. Just because UI is dense does not mean it is not easy to learn. Dense UI provides more information than something with 5 levels of hierarchical layouts, each screen animating with 300ms of bullshit animations. Furthermore, learning curve should be acceptable for people that truly want to use a tool on a daily basis (for e.g. emacs or vim). There is a reason why people who use Bloomberg terminal will never want anything else. Here is a video of the thought process that goes into designing just the keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_juj1MIRJVE Have you used Bloomberg terminal or talked to a user? Regarding lock-in: I think its the opposite - when the users don't want to switch to anything else, that's the best a company can do. That's the kind of "lock-in" every company should aspire to.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I've used a Bloomberg terminal and most of my social circle has as well. I guess maybe difficult isn't the right word to describe it, but definitely uninviting on purpose. And a lot of my friends get a kick out of how uninviting it looks and how much they feel like a wizard using it. Theres definitely an aspect to the way it looks unrefined that make people love it, and I guess a better way of saying it might be that trying to emulate that by making something actually inaccessible and unrefined is not going to be successful
  - fermienrico 7y ago
    I think you're attributing ugliness "on purpose" incorrectly. No one at Bloomberg exclaims "Oh gee, let's make this more ugly, people will get a kick out of it." It's just that they haven't bloated this app with CSS styles and other unnecessary aesthetics. It works. That's all.

greatwave1 7y ago

Thanks for the feedback. Fixed the fonts and title, I'll spend some time tonight working on the other points you brought up.

groby_b 7y ago
Awesome, thank you! (You still might want to align Quiver Quantitative's baseline with the rest. It's the smallest nit of them all, but it's jarring ;)

rckoepke 7y ago

Very genuinely curious, do most people consider these "UX" instead of "UI"? For me, I'd like to be able to click or at least copy/paste the titles of the studies shown on the map, e.g. when I hover over houston, I can visually read the title of the study, but I can't move my mouse to click or highlight the text, or else the box disappears. I'm very glad someone is making a dashboard that actually brings "new" information that's presented differently than other people have presented it. Lots of fairly derivative coronavirus dashboards have popped up on ShowHN over the past month or so, but this is the first along these lines.

groby_b 7y ago
It's probably more UI than UX, but... they're really mutually reinforcing. I'll start calling it U* ;)