Hallelujah. It's not just enterprise apps, either. I've seen more than a few consumer app redesigns that just seemed to tack on the "clean", "minimalist", "whitespace" ethos, without really having a clue of an understanding of how users actually used the product.
I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly difficult to easily browse comment threads and see quality comments. Similarly, despite the old Reddit interface having a reputation as being "ugly", I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.
> I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.
I'm actually trying to "redesign" an app (I put design in quotes because I'm a dev and just trying to make a personal project look nice) and one of the struggles I have had is that high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience. So much nicer to have everything you care about in a single screen.
> high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience.
TL;DR
Your app should have the information density that it needs to be:
1. Useful and
2. Help the user avoid operating the app in a way that they don't intend to or is dangerous
Looking fancy is a secondary concern to good function. Typography has an important function because it is how you convey information to your user. Poorly laid out or written text can cause your user to get tired or use your app wrong.
Of course, making a useful interface is a difficult and long job. It is also thankless work, because if you do a good job your users will use your app without even noticing how well designed it is (good design is invisible!).
It's much easier to slap a pretty facade on your poorly designed app and call it done. People will be impressed by it, but struggle to use it.
I would recommend finding physical copies of Josef Mueller Brockmann's books, especially "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" and "The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems". They are both old (pre-DTP) but have great basic advice about how to design pages.
Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.
Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.
Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.
Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.
I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.
Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.
Yes exactly. CL is probably my favorite website on the internet, for the sheer reason that they have virtually not changed at all since they first launched over 10 years ago. It's fairly incredible. I can't think of another website that has done that.
This still exists?! It's still being updated?!?! So much more content than when I last checked it, which would have been 2004 or so. My faith in the internet is restored.
Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.
And those of us who do remember Windows 1.0 (not using it, though, but I do remember the ads), are probably mostly closer to retirement age than to the start of our careers... I feel old now.
I think craigslist survives _despite_ its ugly UI just because of market lock-in/inertia.
the ui is awful from a utility/ux, pov - it’s limited and hard to shop/browse with.
Definitely - there used to be a bunch of sites that scraped craigslist and put their listings into more browse-able formats (e.g. Padmapper), but once they got too popular, CL started sending C&Ds and filing lawsuits.
That’s the strange thing about reddit’s new design: It not only lacks functionality and performance, but also white space and clean aesthetics. It feels dated already.
It's also slow, unresponsive and breaks all the time. The dark mode toggles back to bright mode randomly, posts sometimes don't render... It takes multiple seconds to render the comments in a thread. It's a mess.
Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.
imo the killer feature of RES is that it makes it extremely easy to manage arbitrarily many sockpuppet accounts. there are other nice features of course, but the ease of managing multiple accounts always stood out as one of the biggest perks to me.
in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.
It was (originally) for localization: ja.reddit.com would (for example) give you a Japanese interface. Eventually they realized what a horrible idea l10n is for a community-oriented site, and dropped the translations, but kept the `lang` that it would apply attributes. Eventually subreddit moderators figured out that you could use this to provide multiple variants of the per-subreddit CSS, such as dark modes, custom filters, and other silliness[0].
Testing it out I found something interesting. You can put in subreddit.reddit.com and it redirects to reddit.com/r/subreddit. But any 2 char prefix works sends to old.reddit.com (a.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/a)
e.g. hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews
Other than "np", as in "np.reddit.com", which is used for "no-participation mode", I think the other two-letter sub-domains are used for language codes. I think at one point in reddit's history doing things like de.reddit.com could give a german site, and so on. I'm not sure what "ud" would refer to, but I assume it's similar.
Given how aggressively reddit push their terrible no good very bad interface, I figure there has to be some advantage to them to my using it? I don't know what that could be, maybe users struggling to use the new interface looks like engagement to ads?
I have seen it in ill fated attempts to replace POS systems that were old green screen types to warehousing stocking tools using the same all with new pretty GUI or web page interfaces. Looking slick is great if customer facing but down in the trenches its all about familiarity, speed, and stability.
One pet peeve of mine is that these old systems are often trivially navigable with a (often custom) keyboard, then replaced with something that needs a mouse.
So 'tap, tap, tap, tap, enter' becomes 'tap, <locate mouse> click, tap, tap <locate mouse>, click'.
Also worth noting - consumer app or website designs that cram negative space everywhere are almost always slow as shit to use compared to their older "ugly" replacements. The way new Reddit renders content is an excellent case in point. An older example is the Guardian website - it's design about four or five years ago was despised by users (which was ignored) because it was slow and made using the site slower.
Reddit also fails to load aporoximately 20% of the time, too. I figured it was growing pains, but they've not changed a thing. They designed it, they're done, and they're really not interested in what the users think.
Oh man, glad I'm not the only one I noticed this. It used to take ~2 seconds to find my favorite playlist and play it. Now it takes upwards of 10-20 seconds.
On the dedicated "select a playlist" page with the squares, it even freaking re-organizes the squares every time you view it! Imagine if your desktop icons re-organized themselves in some arbitrary way every time you needed to open a program, and you get the utter destruction of muscle memory that can make up for the gaps in efficient design.
Netflix is the king of this awfulness for me. Every time I use it the homepage is different. Different lists show up, disappear, change position, etc; even my list of saved shows that I reference all of the time suffers from this. Sticking with literally any layout I've seen on there would be better than the randomness that I have to navigate through each time.
Just give me the damn list of everything in your database and let me search and sort using the metadata. Why do they need to throw algorithms at everything?
> So because Google Play Music is worse at X, that means Spotify's X can't be bad?
It could be that, in most cases, we only think of the options as ones that we've been introduced to.
We're way too busy with daily life to really think in-depth about everything in hypothetical possibilities, such as "here's a way in which a music app that doesn't exist could do it better." Instead, (unless we're very passionate about music), we tend to only think about the options that have been presented to us.
You're extrapolating here. Maybe I was not clear enough. I've never found Spotify's interface to be that bad, but have the same sentiment you hold for Spotify towards Google Play Music.
Also another great example about why user and accessibility testing are very very important. It was downright ignored and when pressed the Admins admitted it. Leave your beliefs at the door and fucking watch how the user interacts with your site, then ask them why they make those choices. Buy them a beer or whatever gets them to talk.
I use "old.reddit.com" exclusively too, information density is king.
Material design and minimalism probably have a lot of strong theory behind them, but the cargo culting around them often leads to worse UX. I think a lot of companies reach the "dedicated UX team/person" stage before the "careful A B testing of user flow" stage.
I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly difficult to easily browse comment threads and see quality comments. Similarly, despite the old Reddit interface having a reputation as being "ugly", I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.