Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

This is true but users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once. I love high-density UI but I think the web and modern design has trended the way it has because focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed.

Now the prevailing trend is this Fischer-Price children's-toys minimalism, with bright shiny colors and cute mascots. It's insulting

View on HN

I wonder if we'll see a resurgence of "real work" ui for desktops and laptops now that most of the "everyone else"/"the mainstream" has shifted to mobile.

I sure hope so. This may be a contentious opinion, but I strongly think that the 'average non-technical user' that has driven so much of modern UI development (for better or for worse) is not representative of someone who should have input when it comes to tools used by professionals. Complex tasks usually benefit from deep, rich interfaces. Simpler ones may be easier to learn, but will always be restrictive once baseline competence has been reached.

> users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once ... focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed

Do you have any links to such studies/focus groups/articles on this? I'd be genuinely curious to read about them.

My experience there is more anecdotal, though over the life of my career one thing I am often measured on is the visual complexity of the UIs that I have made

My last job we brought in focus groups at times and that was exactly their feedback, for an embedded UI for the machine that we sold. It should be noted that that machine required about a week of operator training to use, which included interacting with our UI

I'm not sure screen density is a flaw in the Windows UX/UI style.

A lot of Windows programs have really cluttered, disorganized configuration menus and confusing workflows; PuTTY and ConEmu are two particularly egregious offenders. Seems more like a "developer lacking good design sense" issue, rather than something inherent to the Windows environment.

Interesting--I've never in my career actually seen a user study or focus group that concluded that users don't like dense UIs or lots of options. Not saying they don't exist--sounds like you experienced a group that found this. I've just never seen it myself.

What I see a lot is UI professionals and artists simply declaring that interfaces must be minimal and abstract and that visual complexity is bad. Whether this is just current fashionable dogma, or if there is actually research to support this, I have no idea, but none of the product decision makers I've worked with have ever asked for evidence.

People don't verbalise enthusiasm for lack of busy UI, but they tend to prefer simpler UIs especially if they are not expert users of a more complex UI. It just looks cleaner and less stressful. The choice is expressed through usage rather than studies.

It was something of a unique audience, as these folks were not computer literate and we were training them to be machine operators. On the professional software side of things the big dense UIs seem to be holding their own, so they must have some good :)

Ed Tufte makes the point in his lecture that the sports pages in the newspaper and the stock pages contain loads of many tiny detailed numerical statements. Newspapers are generally written for median intelligence people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com