Our "oldschool" Windows B2B application is quite UI dense. Without looking overly busy, we've got information that can be viewed at a glance that other web-based systems use 6+ pages to contain.
I've seen users struggle to flip between many views in some SPA to figure out if things are right or not in their other system, then come to our system to correlate and looking at one or two windows they see all the same data.
I guess it's just the designers, though it seems CSS and HTML lends itself very well to information-sparse pages.
As we're transitioning to the web, due to customer demand, this is one aspect which I very strongly want to keep. We'll see how it goes.
I think it is the difference between being intended for a professional or consumer audience.
The professional tool is expected to be used for many hours over and over. The ideal design is whatever reduces the cycle load for the user. So you get information dense screens with all the tools up front and exposed. They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
The consumer tool is intended to be used rarely at great intervals. The ideal design is that which gently guides the user through an unfamiliar task. so you end up with deep sparse screens. Much easier to find your way but a pain in the ass when you know what you are doing.
I think a lot of designers over emphasize the experience for new users to the detriment of experienced users. To the point that I use "user-friendly" as a sort of euphemism for shitty software design. remember, usable is not the same thing as user friendly.
> They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
There are a lot of fields and buttons, but also a lot of "smart" logic that's part of our secret sauce that puts us ahead of most competitors.
I've been pondering if this is an area where we could use a LLM to improve the user experience. Have a way for the user to describe what they want to do, and have the LLM provide the steps necessary to do so.
When new it can be hard to read and understand large user manuals, especially when you're on the clock and need to have this order registered and processed yesterday. A lot of our users are not very technical either, so being able to clarify etc could be helpful.
A lot of the professional tools also have the luxury of not needing to be user friendly. Private individuals will just turn away from tools they don't know how to use, corporate employees just straight up don't have that option.
While true, we do try to make it as user friendly as we can, and do incorporate feedback from users. We've also hired a lot of our support staff from our customers, so I frequently ask them for advice when designing new modules and features.
We're a small but growing company, so I've been planning on incorporating more methodical approaches to see where we might improve going forward.
I'm primarily concerned with providing a great product for our users. However I do hope it has a positive effect reducing the load on support.
It can be challenging though. We might provide great training but then that employee moves on and their replacement doesn't get the same training, so they don'tunderstand fully what they're supposed to do or how our software fits in their processes. And users are often not very technical, while the processes they need to perform often can get somewhat technical due to regulations or similar aspects outside of our control. Guiding the unsure users while not getting in the way of the seasoned ones can be a delicate act.
You can be every bit as dense in a web based application... you can make it look the same pixel perfect if you want to go that far.
I've never been a fan over overly dense applications, unless they are purpose built tools. There's a big difference between PhotoShop and Grubhub. Likewise there should be differences depending on display size and UX... If you're going to have users with finger/touch input, then you don't want things too close.. if it's mostly Desktop/Laptop, you can go much more dense with less issues.
Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
> There's a big difference between PhotoShop and Grubhub.
Others in this thread have already pointed out the massive difference in information density of a printed menu over most menus rendered on a mobile device.
> I've never been a fan over overly dense applications, unless they are purpose built tools.
Thing is it doesn't look super-dense. It's just space efficient let's say. Our UI components, based on Win32, makes it quite easy to have relatively dense UIs that's don't look cluttered or busy.
Like I said I'm sure you can do it using HTML and CSS, it just seems not to be done often.
That said it's absolutely a specialized application. At least 99% of our windows/views would make zero sense on a mobile or tablet.
> Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
Yeah we had to manually implement font scaling, before Microsoft added it to Windows. Certainly something we will support going to the web.
Keep in mind if you're selling to new customers, they may find your web app "dated". The new customers likely won't compare the web app to your desktop app, but to other competitors web apps. And these days the expectation for better or worse is that web apps look and feel a certain way (favor whitespace). I'm sure a dense UI can still look clean and modern, but it will take more effort.
We actually got some ex-graphic designers on our team now, so at least there won't be any more "programmer art" icons and such.
Fortunately our customers are mostly interested in functionality, and there's not a ton of competition. But yeah, a good looking interface does have a distinct impact so it will be something we'll have to balance.
I've seen users struggle to flip between many views in some SPA to figure out if things are right or not in their other system, then come to our system to correlate and looking at one or two windows they see all the same data.
I guess it's just the designers, though it seems CSS and HTML lends itself very well to information-sparse pages.
As we're transitioning to the web, due to customer demand, this is one aspect which I very strongly want to keep. We'll see how it goes.