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At a previous company, we had strong feedback from sales that prospects thought our legacy, cash-cow product looked old and outdated. They were right, and those
by ftio 4y ago
At a previous company, we had strong feedback from sales that prospects thought our legacy, cash-cow product looked old and outdated. They were right, and those first impressions are hard to shake. We lost deals (in part) because of design.
We did a minor design update in a beta release that introduced ~30% more vertical padding in lists. Beta testers (long-time customers) hated it. They were pros. They could not only handle the density, but the density enabled key workflows that the additional padding broke.
We ended up making the whitespace preference-controlled. Defaulted to on for new users; defaulted to off for existing users. Solved the sales problem while keeping our long-time customers happy.
For infrequently-used tools, especially transactional ones (e.g., Google Maps), additional whitespace seems to improve legibility, usability, and ultimately engagement. For power-user tools like GitHub in which users spend hours of their time every week, I want to see an industry shift "back" to denser UIs. Power users can handle them and typically benefit from them greatly.
- nine_k 4y agoGMail has three density settings. which mostly affect the amount of whitespace.
- zagrebian 4y agoThe HTML version of Gmail is also very dense, maybe even the densest of all Gmail versions.
- llagerlof 4y agoI only use html gmail. Not because the default GUI is bad, but because its too heavy. Look at these numbers. I just opened here, clicked nothing: "393 request, 5.7 MB transferred, 34.3MB resources" It's crazy.
- nine_k 4y agoIt's an SPA, so it's more like `apt install` than a normal page load. Much of it sits in cache afterwards, and the traffic is reasonable. What I do dislike about Gmail is its propensity to consume CPU sometimes, but it's not the worst offender.
- eastbound 4y agoIn my software, I display popup on hover. I display them immediately because it helps customers to discover, and it looks great with fake data. After 3 month, I add delay, because real users are annoyed with popups on hover. I wonder how much different the products are to different people. If you subscribe to Facebook/Gmail/a lot of webapps, the UI has nothing to do with the old timers’s UIs. I think they try to keep the UI for a given generation of users.
- Hallucinaut 4y agoI think a lot about UI but have never thought about a temporally driven setting before. Great idea!
- SoftTalker 4y agoIt's an extension of the trend for sites to have all kinds of modal popups for new users, or to alert users to new features, that are shown once or a few times and then stop. It's probably a good idea in general, though I don't like them if I have to dismiss them manually. At least please make them go away if I hit ESC. It might be a cool thing if a site prompted the user at some point "You've been using our system for a little while now, would you like to try a denser/more compact layout?"