[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (...
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Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots,
apps, sites)?
Just yesterday I tried to find examples of good high information
density UIs... and seems to be an impossible task. Search engines
are full to the brim with vague articles repeating each other's
talking points, and exception being this blog post by Matthew
Strom: https://matthewstrom.com/writing/ui-density/ Image search
is no better, with largely irrelevant results. In the age when
everything is spaced out and zoned out gray on gray, what are your
go-to examples of UIs that pack a lot of info?
Author : troupo
Score : 353 points
Date : 2025-05-08 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
| MrCoffee7 wrote:
| News aggregators: https://sciurls.com https://techurls.com
| https://mathurls.com https://devurls.com https://skimfeed.com
| https://hackurls.com
| nottorp wrote:
| > Search engines are full to the brim with vague articles
| repeating each other's talking points
|
| You just described the modern search experience on any topic.
|
| As much as I hate it, i'd suggest asking a few "AI"s and trying
| Kagi.
| coffeeindex wrote:
| I recall seeing some discussion about the UI density Japanese
| websites (specifically Japanese news sites). For example:
| https://www.asahi.com/ Now that I think about it, news sites in
| general have fairly high density UIs, not that I consider them to
| be shining examples of great UIs. https://www.yahoo.com
| https://www.bloomberg.com/
| mrweasel wrote:
| Regarding Bloomberg, the Bloomberg Terminal is also a good
| example of a really information dense interface. There is a few
| videos on YouTube where Bloomberg shows examples of how to use
| their terminals.
| MattSayar wrote:
| Like this one [0]. I don't understand most of it but I can
| appreciate how few clicks it takes to get the info you want
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/h0hYYIGryJ4?si=LkBtTVWyomvyEjlM&t=69
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, exactly. It probably makes more sense if you
| understand the terms used in the financial industry.
| Overall I'm just fascinated by the whole system, everything
| from the design language, the UI, the infrastructure and
| the keyboard.
| qntmfred wrote:
| re: Japanese web design
|
| https://youtu.be/vi8pyS076a8
| MrCoffee7 wrote:
| sites that allow you to build your own list of weblinks such as
| https://start.me , eg. here is a specific example
| https://start.me/p/GEQXv7/osint-us
| seanhunter wrote:
| Bloomberg is the obvious example.
|
| It is an extremely well-designed and effective high-information
| density UI designed to be very efficient to use but requiring
| some skills to get the most out of it.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yeah, in general financial software designed for expert users
| (hedge fund managers / traders) is extremely info-dense.
|
| I'm also reminded of World of Warcraft; in my role as a
| "healer", keeping track of changes to the health levels of
| maybe 20 other players in a raid (in addition to all the health
| / spells / weapons / maps / etc for my own avatar's immediate
| needs) required an impressively info-dense UI.
| divbzero wrote:
| Bloomberg Terminal was the first example that came to mind for
| me too:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bloomberg_Terminal_M...
| fauria wrote:
| Command line system monitoring tools like htop, atop, btop, etc:
| https://static.linuxblog.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/btop....
| whalesalad wrote:
| glances is my favorite as far a density goes
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| btop is so good for rapid, dense information communication
| mtve wrote:
| Cisco IOS, highest density information per screen of old days
| CLI, like "sh int" (show interface) to get almost all required
| information at one glance.
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| Wow btop looks fantastic out-of-the-box. I spent a long time
| configuring htop and still don't really like how it displays
| info (although it is an improvement over plain-old top)
| petepete wrote:
| Bottom is also great. I switched from btop because I
| preferred the config format.
|
| https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom
| dejobaan wrote:
| I always thought video games were a good thing to look at here.
| They're NOT always an appropriate reference (being an
| entertainment medium), but you often have to get a pile of info
| up on the screen, legible, quickly. The Game UI Database is
| pretty cool, with 1300-ish games: https://www.gameuidatabase.com
| mg wrote:
| I am developing this project, which replaces product lists with
| what I call "product charts":
|
| https://www.productchart.com
|
| The idea is to sort products not by one parameter (like price or
| release date) but by two - which creates an x/y chart. The
| product info is displayed dynamically - by default only the image
| is show. On hover, more info is displayed in a tooltip. And when
| you click "details", all data is shown.
|
| This way, 300 products easily fit on the screen.
|
| You need to watch it on a monitor to see the chart interface. On
| mobile, I just display a normal list.
| yeknoda wrote:
| This is good. The users this caters to are also higher than
| normal earners. Hate to ask, but what is the monetization plan?
| xnx wrote:
| Probably affiliate commission
| mg wrote:
| Affiliate commissions and license fees from companies who
| want to use the interface for their use-cases.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Good idea, but wow, the popup mechanism is obnoxious. It needs
| to be off to the side in a fixed location that doesn't obscure
| what you're looking at, or make you chase the 'Hide' button
| with your mouse.
| mg wrote:
| Hmm... the way I use it is that when I put the mouse on an
| item, that is the one I am looking at. So it is fine that
| some others are hidden. And when I want to see all items
| again, I move the mouse into an empty area (usually right
| next to the item I just looked at) so the popup goes away.
|
| Also, I usually use the filters first. Say for laptops, I set
| the screen size to >=12inch and the weight to <=3pounds. So
| there ain't that many items left on the screen.
|
| Do you use it differently?
| yencabulator wrote:
| Assumptions about how users will interact with your UX
| always end up badly.
|
| I saw the "big grid" and was curious, so I hovered on the
| icons, moving along a line, just to get an idea of what the
| thing does. Doing that, I kept accidentally moving the
| mouse pointer off-axis so it went into the popup, and was
| "stuck" there, until I dragged it outside the popup again,
| and promptly lost track of what I had already glanced at.
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| This makes sense. One suggestion would be to add a "Click
| to hold" button, which will push the dialog pop-up into a
| corner, maybe in a condensed view, and allow you to select
| more items. Then you can do a selective comparison of
| multiple items at once.
|
| "Click to hold" isn't a good name for the feature, but
| hopefully the idea makes sense.
| mg wrote:
| Have you seen the "compare" button in the popup when you
| hover an item? It lets you highlight multiple items and
| compare them later.
| abraxas wrote:
| I like your project. If I may suggest a feature, DPI option in
| the side panel would be valuable to me. I won't consider any
| products that have a screen with less than 220 DPI (e.g.
| laptops, tablets, monitors etc).
| mg wrote:
| All categories with screens (laptops, tablets, phones,
| monitors) have the option to switch the axis to "pixels per
| inch". Hover one of the axis arrows with the mouse to select
| it.
|
| Does that help?
| ixtli wrote:
| this is great!
| philistine wrote:
| Great website, the monitor section does not easily cover the
| use case of macOS users. We want Retina grade displays (5K at
| 27-inches, 6K at 32-inches). I don't think you even have
| Apple's monitors?
| philistine wrote:
| Oh and that drive
| (https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/22778) is marked as
| 20$ per GB, when it's a 1 TB drive for 50$. Many drives have
| the same problem.
| mg wrote:
| It is 20 GB per Dollar.
| mg wrote:
| Yes, product selection is not perfect yet. I originally set
| out to display the 300 most relevant products in each
| category. It is probably better to have a larger set of
| products in each category.
|
| I will tackle that. Not sure yet how hard / easy it will be.
| Because more than 300 items on the screen initially might
| make them too small. And adding more as one uses the filters
| might be confusing.
| irq-1 wrote:
| I wonder if you can help the user move between a 'must have'
| filter (like on the left) and a looser 'pefer' filter, like
| choosing an area of the chart (like Select in paint apps.)
| Maybe it could be as simple as changing the checkmark/slider
| options to have 3 values: null, must, prefer. For example,
| check a few CPUs as your required spec, but also a few others
| as the prefered.
|
| Like/dislike might be a better description. Then make the chart
| show color or size to indicate the preferences.
| smusamashah wrote:
| You made some other projects too to search movies for example
| right? I can't remember the name at the moment.
|
| edit: found them.
|
| https://www.gnovies.com/ and https://www.movie-map.com/
|
| There are other projects to find music and art too. I have only
| used movies one a number of times.
| mg wrote:
| Yes, these are also projects of mine.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I like it. I wish the larger image would immediately vanish
| after I scroll off rather than take a few seconds.
|
| Great way to present a large amount of data though
| mNovak wrote:
| Nice idea. I worked for a while on a "computer blue book", e.g.
| to answer the question how much a laptop of given specs
| _should_ cost.
|
| For something like laptops, I recommend providing the option to
| look at a CPU benchmark score. A list a CPU models isn't super
| helpful, and even then a "intel i5" can mean something very
| different depending on the generation.
|
| To me there seems to be a vast overemphasis on screen specs (7
| spec lines)
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Tracy [1] is the first thing that comes to my mind, then
| RenderDoc [2].
|
| After that Visual Studio while debugging. In general, I think
| graphical debuggers and profiling tools do a relatively good job
| of packing lots of information into many, small windows.
|
| [1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
|
| [2] https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc
| whalesalad wrote:
| https://www.netdata.cloud manages to pack quite a lot into one
| experience.
| thesurlydev wrote:
| Once upon a time I day traded and the go-to interface was
| TradingView[1]
|
| [1] https://www.tradingview.com/
| n4kana wrote:
| Project management software that includes customizable
| dashboards, gantt charts or kanban. Spreadsheet apps are the
| definition of high information density UIs that you manage
| through zooming.
|
| Audio DAW or video production apps jam tiny buttons and
| indicators all over the place. A mixing console is the epitome of
| this. Shit, the cockpit of a plane. AutoCAD. Stock trading apps.
| These aren't great in the web UI sense - the pattern that emerges
| is that dense UIs are for experts or people who dedicate a lot of
| time to learning the UI and appreciate the long-term efficiency
| that short term inefficient brings.
| chromy wrote:
| Look for tracing/profiling/binary analysis UIs:
|
| - https://superuser.com/questions/1117466/using-windows-perfor...
|
| - https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
|
| - https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
|
| 3D modeling / CAD software:
|
| - Blender/Rhino etc
|
| - Similar for audio you can search for 'DAWs'
| (https://blog.landr.com/best-daw/)
|
| Many examples on https://x.com/usgraphics/media only some
| software.
|
| Not on the data side but can be useful just for contrast from
| todays software:
|
| - https://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/
|
| - https://cari.institute/aesthetics
| wackget wrote:
| As someone who recently tried to use Blender for an extremely
| simple task... Blender's UI is absolutely terrible and should
| not be used as an example of anything except how to design an
| unintuitive UI.
| chromy wrote:
| I think intuitiveness and density are orthogonal properties
| (although often both desirable).
|
| Regarding Blender specifically:
|
| Do you have a background in 3D modeling?
|
| I am genuinely curious.
|
| I don't come from an digital art background and I bounced off
| Blenders UI several times but after doing a tutorial or two
| now I find I can use it for simple things. I have always
| wondered how much it was 3D modeling in general vs. Blender
| specifically.
|
| In a similar case I have used both Inkscape and Illustrator
| as an amateur and, much as I love open source, there is no
| comparison. Illustrator was significantly easier to use and
| worked better.
| jwagenet wrote:
| Professional tools are often made for the efficiency of a
| professional user and are hard to grok at first glance. Other
| examples from the parent, like DAWs, suffer from this and
| Blender is no exception. By all accounts it used to be a lot
| worse.
| cluckindan wrote:
| It is geared towards keyboard use, but I agree, the UI is not
| structured very well - too much mystery meat!
| VectorLock wrote:
| Sometimes I watch HOWTOs with Blender and it says stuff
| like "Hit NumPad +" and it makes me think, damn they going
| to tell me to start using the META key next?
| rollcat wrote:
| Agree on DAWs. Even though I'm familiar with the general
| concepts, every time I try out a new one (Logic, Reaper,
| Ableton), it's quite overwhelming at first. You have a pretty
| good idea about what's _supposed_ to be there, but the sheer
| amount of knobs and buttons... But once you get in the flow,
| you quickly find out it has all the information you need,
| nothing more nothing less, it becomes second nature.
|
| (Notable omission: GarbageBand. It has the opposite effect, it
| instantly puts you into action, but becomes more frustrating
| the more you use it.)
| tgv wrote:
| Logic Pro X really impressed me with its accessible UI. Yes,
| there are a lot of functions, but they don't get in the way,
| and the important ones are fairly discoverable. Reaper, OTOH,
| not so much. Its routing is ... flexible, but unfortunately
| also in places where it doesn't matter, or even gets in the
| way.
| marttt wrote:
| Ardour has really good default settings.
|
| Another, maybe forgotten one is Wavosaur on Windows [1].
| Great modularity, one can quickly remove cruft that's not
| needed, or add a lot of data on waveforms when necessary. I
| admit being a fan of the Classic Windows era UIs, though. :)
|
| A third, also forgotten one from the Win2k/9x GUI era is
| maybe Waveshop [2], also a great example of keeping things
| simple.
|
| Funny thing: I used Reaper for years (occasional pro-level
| radio production), then had to switch to Pro Tools because of
| studio demands. Afterwards tried going with Reaper again, but
| got really overwhelmed with all those endless possibilities
| for customization. So... I ended up using Ardour, which was
| easiest to grasp from day one. Really well thought out and
| polished GUI. Possibly a great example of why it makes sense
| to have a subscription/payment based, non-free open source
| project.
|
| Oh, and Audacity up to version 1.26 was also great. After
| 2.x, it started to add bloat IMO. I remember Eric S. Raymond
| highlighted it as a great example of modular, unix-y design
| in "The Art of Unix Programming" [3].
|
| 1: https://www.wavosaur.com/
|
| 2: https://victimofleisure.github.io/WaveShop/
|
| 3: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch06s01.html#a
| ud...
| sunshinekitty wrote:
| The zachtronics website is completely broken on mobile with
| constant full-screening images, had to re-open my browser to
| exit..
| rfl890 wrote:
| have to agree with you on the DAWs. The first time I opened FL
| Studio I felt like I was looking at an aircraft's control
| panel.
| porphyra wrote:
| I love Rhino's CLI-focused UI. Too bad it is nearly impossible
| to run it on Linux with Wine [1]
|
| [1] https://github.com/smola/wine-rhino3d
| flakiness wrote:
| https://ui.perfetto.dev/ is also good in this line.
| chromy wrote:
| heh, I worked on that one so I didn't feel like I should put
| it. I'm happy you thought of it though.
| interloxia wrote:
| I like that the U.S. Graphics Company link has a bunch of TUI
| examples.
|
| htop came to mind.
|
| https://htop.dev/
|
| Here's a gallery of a bunch of TUI apps.
|
| https://www.linuxlinks.com/100-awesome-must-have-tui-linux-a...
| aristofun wrote:
| SOunds almost like the opposite sides of the spectrum.
|
| With some exceptions and edge cases (like trading or aviation
| where you have to see a lot of information at once, density is
| the product in itself) I argue that by "good" UI most UI users
| really mean "well structured and carefully prioritized
| information that doesn't overwhelm you" (aka "low information
| density").
|
| It is really hard to find good UI in that sense. Apple is doing
| okay job in their iOS and macOS UI in general. Modern car makers
| (some of them at least) reached a pretty good point when a lot of
| complexity is hidden behind a very intuitive UI.
|
| Btw, Apple was expected to be good at UIs because of its history
| of _inheriting_ xerox's military UI research achievements.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's a fair point, and my own earlier example (newspaper-like
| layout for online news) links through to the source "lite"
| article ... which _is_ laid out with ample whitespace and no
| distractions.
|
| Which contrasts to the typical online news article which is
| littered with advertisements and "Related" links (which are not
| in fact related), as well as multiple calls-to-action for
| newsletters, registrations, donations, and all the rest (WaPo,
| NPR, PBS, and others all come to mind). Not to mention autoplay
| video and audio, dickbars, etc., etc.
|
| My _front page_ is _information dense_. Its job is to convey
| what current breaking news is. _It is text-only_ , partly
| because incorporating images from upstream is complicated, _but
| mostly because those images convey no useful information_.
|
| "Information appropriate" is probably a better overall term,
| where for _survey_ or _multiple-element_ presentation should
| have many discrete items, but where _detailed presentation_
| focuses on one _and only one_ item, which can be read in depth
| without distraction.
|
| That said, _not having shit that moves_ in _either_ case is a
| huge improvement over Web defaults these days.
| abound wrote:
| I didn't see anyone mention the McMaster-Carr website [1]. It may
| not be the "densest" out there, but it's clean, functional, and
| nicely presents a lot of information at once.
|
| [1] https://www.mcmaster.com/
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| of of course, RockAuto.com
| whalesalad wrote:
| one of the most unconventional websites ever for sure
| vvpan wrote:
| Very ext.js looking.
| agumonkey wrote:
| And there's something utilitarian in its internal and external
| design. No flashy, no fancy.. 99% informational and low lag.
| CleanCoder wrote:
| The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos
| taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies
| used to accomplish this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| related: https://syntax.fm/show/855/fast-websites-the-new-
| speculation...
| agumonkey wrote:
| I remember people digging into this because it used good
| sense over vanilla js instead of complicated stack.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| tl;dw - ASP.net, image sprites, yui, jquery, preloading,
| and caching
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I've always assumed that making a fast and responsive
| website isn't a technical problem, but a social/political
| one.
|
| It's easy to create a website where interactions simply
| fetch the necessary resources and update the DOM as
| required. But managers then insist on adding 20 trackers so
| every little click and interaction gets logged somewhere
| for analytics.
|
| Or are frameworks _REALLY_ that slow?
| WillAdams wrote:
| There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com
| which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory:
|
| - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page
| recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage
|
| - the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced
| cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders
| which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the
| vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for
| repeat orders on a schedule
|
| If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be
| grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page:
| https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ is just a
| mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the
| overall architect. This link is decent:
| https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr
|
| There was of course previous discussion of this here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502
|
| Video on why the site loads so fast:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ
|
| (which is from the Medium.com article)
| squiggy22 wrote:
| I wonder how much additional traffic, links, seo benefit and
| general brand awareness this site has generated simply off
| doing things to this standard.
|
| A fly wheel of benefits.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Actually, I'm pretty sure I've never seen a McMaster link
| in any search engine. Even if you google a direct McMaster
| part number, like "91251A449", McMaster will not be among
| the results. While the url to that product is just
| https://www.mcmaster.com/91251A449/
| spookie wrote:
| "Black oxide screw" on the other hand appears.
|
| Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated
| things. They are not a good search query.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Maybe, but I never seem to have trouble searching for
| even further incomprehensible part numbers on other
| items. Give me a DigiKey part number like "WM7610CT-ND"
| and google finds it first thing. Digikey is also the
| first result for the manufacturer part number
| "0533980671".
|
| For my McMaster example, google gives 9 results, none of
| which are the McMaster site. That not specific enough? To
| be fair, I believe McMaster to be fairly protective of
| their catalog.
|
| At least their part numbers are fairly recognizable -
| they are usually about 10 characters long, all numbers,
| with an "A" near the end. That's usually enough to get me
| to check the McMaster site first.
| btown wrote:
| There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part
| numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use
| Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than
| the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors
| a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize
| for them.
|
| On the other hand, if you train people that if you want
| to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the
| McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as
| your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a
| customer for life.
|
| You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly
| measurable and testable way, for your unique audience
| and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is
| by design.
| rbinv wrote:
| No idea if intentional or not, but the reason is this
| noindex directive: <meta name="robots"
| content="noindex, noarchive, noimageindex" />
| dewey wrote:
| If you have a lot of product pages (millions) it can make
| sense to not have all of them indexed by a search engine.
| If you have pages that are more profitable and might hit
| more keywords than some very specific product SKU it
| makes sense to index these primarily.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am not here to shill for Google, but I cannot believe
| that Google doesn't have a special arrangement with
| McMaster to index all of their part numbers! The
| advertising potential is very good. As a related point, I
| am _almost_ sure they have special handling for
| programming searches to prefer StackOverflow over other
| sources. A few times, SO.com has made some incredibly
| tiny change to their webpages that made them virtually
| invisible to Google. After some internal email exchanges,
| SO.com was "fixed", and again, dominated Google
| programming searches. (Of course, this was 2010s... long
| before the AI slop era!)
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant: https://twitter.com/mcmasterdaily
| nicce wrote:
| If you don't care about SEO, Single-page Applications usually
| reach the same feeling? when the components are well
| designed, and clicking something just fetches the parameters
| for the components that are primarily loaded on the initial
| render. But usually the implementations are poor or there is
| additional bloat so we don't see them as fast.
| wussboy wrote:
| So, SPAs are the communism of the web app world?
| nicce wrote:
| I have no idea what you mean.
| SilasX wrote:
| I assume the analogy meant, "It's great in theory, but in
| practice no one does it right."
| gwern wrote:
| I did some searching and I'm not sure the answer you remember
| exists. All I can find after a bunch of keyword + date-
| restricted searches in Google, Quora, & HN is Ibrahim Bashir
| (https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-
| the-w...) who worked there 2003-2005
| (https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-for-McMaster-
| Carr...) and who writes:
|
| > McMaster-Carr has a Systems department which handles
| internal software development, including the website. I
| actually worked on a lot of the front-end functionality
| (among other things) during my tenure there and we had 1
| person who was essentially the UX lead (I'm sure the team /
| function has expanded since then). > > The design philosophy
| for the website was heavily influence by Edward Tufte and
| myself and several folks from my engineering team were
| enrolled in his course to familiarize ourselves with key
| concepts. > > When I interviewed with McMaster-Carr I
| distinctly remember a Director who told me about building the
| first version of the website himself and not realizing it
| would become "a real thing" one day. I cannot for the life of
| me remember his name, but he was a sharp guy and I'm sure
| he's off doing great things. We walked into work one Monday
| morning, and his desk was empty and his whiteboard said
| "poof".
|
| Given the timing and his description of what he did, it seems
| unlikely any other McMaster-Carr insider would have been
| writing about it, and this has to be what you are
| remembering, if anything.
|
| (And https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ seems
| useless here.)
| WillAdams wrote:
| That's it! Thanks!
| fortyseven wrote:
| This was absolutely amazing to navigate on mobile! Very fast.
| Instant response. Loved it.
| alwa wrote:
| Part of its pleasure is the way it reduces an intrinsically
| dense catalog of parts to such a consistent and sensibly-
| structured interface.
|
| Even though it's never failed to connect me with _precisely_
| the part I'm seeking, to this day their interface spooks me a
| little: where are they hiding the endless walls of text and
| part numbers, the kaleidoscopic wall of bins?!
| the_svd_doctor wrote:
| This is incredible. Almost feels like another world.
| fourside wrote:
| It's one of the first examples in the link the OP shared. It's
| a high quality post!
| quacksilver wrote:
| RS is similar though was better in the past
|
| example: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/c/?searchTerm=zync+7010
| jotux wrote:
| Similarly good, but small mechanical component specific:
| https://shop.sdp-si.com/
| rdtsc wrote:
| Absolutely! Every time I see it mentioned, I end up browsing it
| just marveling what a nice job they did. It's laid well very
| well, has just the right information, it's lightning fast, I
| like the color scheme.
|
| If there is a UI design award somewhere, they should definitely
| get it.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I'm going to go against the crowd and say that I prefer DigiKey
| and Mouser's sites over McMaster. The filter/apply pattern they
| use when trying to narrow things down is a lot quicker than
| waiting for Mcmaster's auto updating window. Usually, when I'm
| looking for something, it's not for an exact specific item, but
| to know what options are even there in the first place.
| Selecting ranges of things in McMaster has always felt a little
| cumbersome, but Digikey has always had it right.
|
| The other thing McMaster does that's kind of annoying, but also
| kind of funny, is that they go out of their way to purge the
| branding of the items they stock. Very understandable why they
| do that, but sometimes they do it when it doesn't make sense.
| Want to buy a generic "graphing calculator" for $126 which is
| definitely not a Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus? Here you go!
| [1]. Look, you're not fooling anybody here.
|
| [1] https://www.mcmaster.com/8392T11/
| kube-system wrote:
| I kind of like how they genericize everything. It reduces the
| cognitive load of making decisions, and presents all of the
| options in the most uniform way, based on their hard specs,
| and not marketing BS.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| It's ok most of the time, but it's not like they sell
| McMaster branded stuff in McMaster packaging. They are a
| supplier, and might want to obfuscate to keep you from
| buying direct from the actual manufacturers.
|
| On the other hand, on my desk right now is a bag of
| springs, the info printed on it says it was made by WB
| Jones, part number 4011. We ordered it from McMaster. Why
| not? They stock the item and ship super quick. If I want
| another bag of the same springs, it's not like I can go to
| McMaster, type in "springs 4011" and expect to find it.
| Instead, I'll have to search up purchasing requests I've
| made, maybe ask a coworker if they ordered them, etc. to
| find the mcmaster number again. If I didn't know Mcmaster
| sold it to us, I'd have no idea they sold it at all.
|
| To be fair, if they sell things that are interchangeable,
| like screws, it would be a lot to list every manufacturer
| they use. They have 5 locations, and probably stock from a
| different manufacturer or multiple manufacturers at each
| one.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Buying from McMaster is like ordering mil spec part
| numbers. You don't really care who makes it or what
| vendor-specific p/n they give it, you just want the part
| built to spec for the cheapest price and soonest delivery
| date.
| greenavocado wrote:
| What you're looking for is rockauto.com but for your
| industry.
|
| In my opinion it is superior to McMaster
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, on McMaster you don't really need to know the brand
| because they only have good stuff that meets spec.
|
| On RockAuto, watch out, because they stock some hot
| garbage.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| The calculator is an extreme example, but I've wondered in
| the past if the reason they scrub everything is so you can't
| take the manufacturer part number to buy elsewhere. McMaster
| is undoubtedly more expensive in many cases, but the service
| they offer is consolidating a million parts into one catalog
| with CAD drawings, specs, etc. Hiding branding prevents you
| from taking advantage of that without making a purchase.
| 91bananas wrote:
| I think everything McMaster dates to it being a physical book
| first. They still operate on that same business model, but we
| have the internet now. The supplied product might change, but
| it still meets whatever specification is in the catalog that
| is released yearly. If they could guarantee a TI-83 Plus was
| what you were going to get they would have put it in the
| catalog, but they couldn't so they don't. And they STILL
| operate out of that physical book for some customers, so the
| website has to match it too. That's my take.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Oh yeah, the books are impressive in their own right.
| However many items you think they sell looking at the
| website, the book reveals you were a couple orders of
| magnitudes off. 1000+ bible-thin pages of well laid out
| tables and product photos. It's pretty much what the
| website would look without any filtering of the items.
|
| The books are fun to leaf through on occasion, or if you
| need to take up an extra 3 inches on your bookshelf with
| something yellow. If you have one, it makes you feel like a
| real engineer. But I greatly prefer the website.
| bombcar wrote:
| The old grainger catalogs were like that. Uline is
| similar but not even 1/4 the number of products.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| McMaster serves a different market than Digikey/Mouser...
| ddoolin wrote:
| I have written a couple internal parts databases and this was
| my starting point as far as design/UI/UX.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| There is a project that implements the site in Next.js
| https://github.com/ethanniser/NextFaster
| hbarka wrote:
| Wow that's beautiful. The grayscale works surprisingly well
| with high fidelity. Thanks for sharing
| fedsocpuppet wrote:
| I love McMaster but the multi-tab experience could really be
| better. Search filters don't carry through opening a link in a
| new tab (try searching M3 screw then ctrl-click socket head
| screws). Sometimes ctrl-clicking product numbers/product detail
| doesn't work at all. IIRC the back button sometimes breaks too.
| Pretty annoying since 80% of the time I'm researching the best
| component and want to backtrack easily.
| downboots wrote:
| WinDirStat or QDirStat
| throwaway39875 wrote:
| Most ECAD software packages have very high information density -
| look at Altium Designer, Mentor XPedition, OrCAD Cadence, Proteus
| PCB, Eagle, or KiCAD for examples.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I've been on a similar journey, and I haven't found any good
| resources.
|
| Much of the low-density trend can be traced back to Tailwind. I
| love the library, but I do find it frustrating that pretty much
| all designers lean towards low-density by default.
|
| The problem is that it only works well for casual/consumer
| applications. Once you start building for professional,
| productivity-driven products, you need density.
|
| One shining example I can think of is: https://usgraphics.com/
| smoe wrote:
| I think Tailwind didn't start the trend, but continued from
| what Bootstrap and Material Design started in the 2010s
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| How did Tailwind contribute to the low-density trend? I use it
| a lot and don't really find myself forced to create "low-
| density" sites based on any decision by the library-makers.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I should've specified Tailwind UI. The book Refactoring UI
| explicitly says "use more whitespace than you think you
| need", and that bit of advice is evident in all the
| components that Tailwind UI offers. They do look nice, but
| it's become so heavily used that designers lean on it
| reflexively, rather than considering whether it makes sense
| in that context.
| eddyg wrote:
| Their X feed is _fantastic_ : https://x.com/usgraphics
| drewcoo wrote:
| Does the cockpit of a 747 count as "UI" for this task?
|
| https://www.popsci.com/747-cockpit-tour-mark-vanhoenacker/
| Scarblac wrote:
| Airplane cockpits are an obvious example (but not on a computer
| screen, of course). All the controls readily available.
| thih9 wrote:
| Programs used by pro creatives. Some people regularly spend
| 8h/day using a single such product as their primary work tool.
|
| E.g. pro desktop versions of photo, print, video, sound, etc
| editing software usually feature good UX and high information
| density.
|
| One well known example of that is Blender - here is a chapter
| from their manual about its user interface:
| https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/window_s...
| turnsout wrote:
| This is the answer! Information density is not inherently a
| virtue. For many tasks, you want to focus the user's attention,
| which usually means less density. But professionals often want
| as much as possible accessible from a single screen, so they
| don't need to click around too much.
|
| In addition to creative software, look at professional
| stock/crypto trading platforms, EHRs, POS systems, CRMs, or any
| software targeted at a vertical--veterinarians, fleet
| management software, etc. Many of them will run counter to
| "good UI" best practices. But if you interview their users, you
| might be surprised by what they love about these interfaces.
| lazyhideous wrote:
| Agreed! I use Cinema 4D, Illustrator and other tools on the
| daily and I love the fact that I can rearrange my panels how I
| need. That's something that I notice modern web-based UIs based
| on 1960s gestalt doesn't really have. Plus all of them are
| dense because of functions, not for fluff. I really, really
| like Cinema 4D for that reason, their design choices are top
| notch.
| jorvi wrote:
| I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image
| editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for
| Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom).
|
| One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to
| industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their
| huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its
| closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows.
|
| Meanwhile open source image editors go out of their way to have
| keybinds, workflows and button placement that deviate
| significantly from Photoshop. Smells strongly of NIH.
| biofox wrote:
| What the heck happened to Photoshop and Illustrator (and the
| whole Adobe suite)? They monochromed all of their icons and
| removed most of their text and tooltips.
|
| As a casual user, I used to be able to use their tools fairly
| proficiently, but now I find them virtually unusable.
| gertlex wrote:
| GIMP did this too.
|
| Bless Irfanview and Inkscape for having color icons
| still...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > They monochromed all of their icons
|
| One reason I heard is that color needed to be removed to
| not alter your color perception when editing a photo.
| pfg_ wrote:
| Affinity designer went the opposite way and colorized them
| in 2.0
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There are already two top quality offers available in
| Affinity and Pixelmator, both for extremely cheap prices. No
| need for any open source project.
| somat wrote:
| Did they?
|
| I am only an occasional blender user, but I have been using
| it a long time. since 1.7
|
| the main key binds I have always used have not changed. tab,
| g, r s, e, b, A, f, ctl-click to add points.
|
| Are you telling me those are the industry standard keybinds
| (surprised pikachu face)
|
| One thing I always felt blender did better than the "industry
| standard tools" was it's quick/natural workflow. I have not
| used Maya since collage in 2000 but back then it was very
| clunky compared to blender for quick vertex based editing. My
| theory is more that the "industry standard tools" caught up
| to blender. but by then blender had a bad reputation as being
| quirky, so the "big redesign" was more a press-release. Give
| it a menu bar make it dark mode and most importantly got to
| cure that bad-reputation so tell everyone it is completely
| different now.
| sneak wrote:
| Don't hold your breath for Darktable; the devs are hellbent
| on being as user-hostile as possible. It needs to be forked
| or replaced to make any progress.
|
| Somebody forked it and was trying to do just that; I don't
| know the status of that project.
|
| https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel
| julik wrote:
| "8h" is "a decent 9-to-5 workday". Then you sometimes have
| overtime...
| jarboot wrote:
| godel terminal, prosperous universe
| coldpie wrote:
| I feel the Ars Technica front page in List View (you have to pick
| List View at the top!!) is quite nicely dense. Just a
| straightforward headline, blurb, and image list.
| https://arstechnica.com/
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Too bad the website somehow has comments which make Reddit look
| saintly. Seriously, their moderation is abhorrent.
| threetonesun wrote:
| My go to for UI inspiration especially packing in a lot of
| information in a small space are mobile apps in the audio
| editing/creating domain. Loopy Pro is one I always bring up, but
| there are a lot of audio apps that have to fit a lot of
| information on the screen at once while being highly intuitive
| because the app itself is not the primary interface, a midi
| controller or instrument is.
| obsolete_wagie wrote:
| apollo.io
| ashwinsundar wrote:
| I don't find this site to be particularly information-dense.
| There is a lot of scrolling needed just to extract a few
| sentences of info about what this site even is. Although the
| graphics and design are cool.
| boris wrote:
| In our package repository web interface we aimed for high
| information density over design fluff: https://cppget.org
| Especially our builds page.
| globnomulous wrote:
| https://www.weather.gov/
| rft wrote:
| I find Geizhals' filtering options reasonably compact and
| information dense.
| https://geizhals.de/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&pg=1&view=li...
|
| I like the simple table view of RPiLocator. Only a few columns,
| but lots of rows, no unneeded clutter. https://rpilocator.com/
|
| Not as compact as possible, but at least shows quite some
| information: GSMArena. It could fit more phones into the
| comparison table with less whitespace/greyspace though.
| https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10386&idPhone...
|
| All sites as viewed on desktop, on mobile this would likely not
| work out.
|
| I also want to echo the command line tools mention in another
| comment. GDB's TUI is reasonable for my use, but after some
| experience this recently posted terminal debugger might be
| better: https://github.com/al13n321/nnd via
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905185
|
| Also the hex editor I am currently using, despite some problems:
| https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
|
| An example of an information dense GUI that might be a bit
| overwhelming is Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra
| (page includes a basic screenshot, you can fill your screen(s)
| with as many sub windows and information panes as you want)
|
| As a side note, while trying to find examples I realized just how
| few websites there are (any more?) that show a lot of information
| at the same time. Worst recent offender is YouTube's redesign
| with only 3 video tiles in a row on a 1440p screen, luckily
| easily fixed via a ublock rule.
| netsharc wrote:
| English version of Geizhals: https://skinflint.co.uk
| toddwprice wrote:
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/
| radiorental wrote:
| The premise of Tufte's work make sense until you try to apply
| it to functional and usable user interfaces.
|
| He has strong opinions strongly held but as someone who's
| designed industrial strength UIs for over 20 years (networking
| CLIs & UIs, CAD modeling/simulation, Devops dashboards,
| cybersecurity tooling) I've read all his books, attended his
| lectures... he's a king with no clothes
| gwern wrote:
| Unfortunately, the site was butchered a year or two ago with a
| redesign to make it look like a garden-variety Wordpress blog.
| A ton of content disappeared. The front page is reasonably
| dense, although one might also just call it cluttered, but the
| subpages are worse - sometimes a single paragraph lost in a sea
| of wrappers.
| robinwarren wrote:
| The ft has some good stuff, this is probably a good jumping off
| point
| https://www.ft.com/content/c7bb24c9-964d-479f-ba24-03a2b2df6...
| smoe wrote:
| Ableton Live digital audio workstation, is a good example in my
| opinion. As with many professional tools, there is a steep
| learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes very
| productive. There are many nested collapsible sections, so you
| can choose to have an all-at-once view or focus on fewer
| elements.
|
| Here is a blog post talking about the different ui elements
| http://nenadmilosevic.co/ableton-live-redesign/
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| There are 3 hands on a clock because 4 is too many to be useful
| and 2 is not quite enough to launch a tactical military strike.
| abraxas wrote:
| I'd say the OLD Bank of Nova Scotia page is a good example. There
| are a lot of details and almost everything is a hyperlink but
| it's quite easy to navigate once you've used it a few times. The
| new UI they are trying to publish is the opposite of that and
| being resisted by long term customers. Currently both are in use.
| I'm sorry but can't put a screenshot without risking leaks of my
| personal info. here are a couple of screenshots I found on public
| pages:
|
| https://d33v4339jhl8k0.cloudfront.net/docs/assets/5be07d872c...
|
| https://www.scotiaitrade.com/content/dam/slf/images/HowToAcc...
| tnolet wrote:
| The basic, classic Salesforce UI. In this screenshot the classic
| is on the left, the new one they pushed already years ago on the
| right: https://www.newfangled.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/06/LEXOpp...
| mikedelfino wrote:
| I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but these two come
| to mind:
|
| - Mixx: https://mixxx.org/screenshots/
|
| - darktable: https://www.darktable.org/about/screenshots/
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| shout out to mixxx, a truly excellent piece of free software
| achr2 wrote:
| This is my own software, but - as a project engineering data
| exploration tool - high information and functional density was a
| key goal:
|
| https://engdata.com/
| gr33nq wrote:
| What UI framework did you use to build this? I love these types
| of interfaces in native applications.
| achr2 wrote:
| This was build originally with WPF and C#, but with an in-
| house MVVM framework. I have been slowly moving it to
| Avalonia, which I highly recommend.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Looks impressive
| khaki54 wrote:
| Netvibes if you set it up that way. I use it for RSS feeds by
| Federal Agency, filtered by some concepts and keywords.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/TtruELg
| radiorental wrote:
| Grafana can get pretty info dense very quickly. Try some of the
| dashboards or the Explore feature here https://play.grafana.org/
|
| I worked there as a product designer for a couple of years, I now
| work on even more data dense UI in the cyber security domain,
| e.g. https://elastio.com/blog/cyber-recovery/three-clicks-to-
| rans...
|
| As with almost all UI design the answer is "It Depends". If you
| could provide a little more context around the domain you're
| working in I'm sure I could point you at some specific examples
| jedberg wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com
|
| We used to have an even denser display, but they sadly got rid of
| it. It was the original reddit mobile interface (served as a
| webpage, not an app).
|
| There is a screenshot on this blog post (by one of the guys who
| worked on it): https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/
| hightrix wrote:
| Came here to say the same. Old Reddit is such a fantasticly
| dense, yet readable UI. It doesn't have too much whitespace,
| but there is enough so there's always room to click on nothing.
|
| It is absolutely my preferred UI for consuming large amounts of
| information quickly.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Reddit absolutely dropped the ball with the redesign
| pier25 wrote:
| And they keep dropping it...
|
| They migrated from that React SPA to Lit web components and
| the UX still sucks
| pier25 wrote:
| This.
|
| I still use old reddit with RES. It's a bit ugly but perfectly
| functional. Tried the newer web versions a couple of times over
| the years and just hate the whole experience.
|
| A couple of years ago I considered building a web client for
| Reddit but then the whole API thing happened.
|
| Maybe it's time to build a new Reddit? :)
| jedberg wrote:
| > Maybe it's time to build a new Reddit?
|
| Alexis and Kevin are already trying to do that with the new
| Digg. ;)
| pier25 wrote:
| Oh woah didn't know!
| ChiperSoft wrote:
| > Maybe it's time to build a new Reddit? :)
|
| Lemmy is serving my former reddit needs quite well.
| panic wrote:
| I'm grateful that "compress the link display" still works, at
| least! Thanks to whoever internally is keeping it alive.
| jcalx wrote:
| The Bloomberg Terminal [0] has been very high-density and high-
| contrast since its early days of being an 80x25 terminal
| interface. Some would say it's not the prettiest UI (although as
| a former employee I still have a soft spot for it) but it's
| incredibly functional and also unmistakeable at a distance.
|
| [0]
| https://assets.bbhub.io/image/v1/resize?width=auto&type=webp...
| k2enemy wrote:
| I really like the density and legibility of weather underground's
| forecasts: https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/ca/san_jose
| pinko wrote:
| Used to be so much better before the acquisition, but I agree,
| they were wonderful at it for a while and some of the UI
| remains.
| amitp wrote:
| Agree. Weatherspark is great too -- https://weatherspark.com/
| map?pageType=4&yearNumber=2025&ids=...
|
| Each of those icons is a _full year_ of weather data. Left to
| right is Jan to Dec. Bottom to top is the hours of the day.
| The pixel color tells you cold vs hot.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| Chrome Devtools (and firebug) are classic, well thought out dense
| interfaces. so are VSCode, Jetbrains IDEs.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Chrome debugger tools? htop? visidata [1]? Clicker games are
| interesting in that they start bare and end up filling the screen
| with controls. Rerun visualizations come to mind too [2].
|
| --
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
|
| 2: https://rerun.io/viewer
| Zaheer wrote:
| We think about information density a lot at Levels.fyi. I don't
| think we're perfect but we do have a fairly dense UX:
| https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&cou...
| chambers wrote:
| Agoda has worked well for me.
| vasco wrote:
| Datadog does a good job with their logs explorer and custom
| dashboards.
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| Yeah, Datadog's pretty amazing at having an absolute ton of
| depth but concealing most of the complexity behind a friendly-
| ish interface. Came into this thread to compliment them in
| particular.
|
| (If anyone from Datadog reads this, please 1) introduce a
| hobbyist tier so I can afford to use DD on my Pi bramble, 2)
| consider hiring me, or 3) both)
| layer8 wrote:
| The Outlook calendar comes to mind: https://aspisfun.com/blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/08/outlook...
|
| More: https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=outlook+calendar
| SkyeCA wrote:
| I think e621 would count. (Disclaimer it's a highly NSFW furry
| booru so I'm not going to provide a link on HN)
|
| It has has one of (if not) the best tagging systems of any
| website and between the tags and search filters you can find
| _anything_ you like.
|
| Each page has a header with useful links, a list of tags to the
| left, and a grid of paginated images with basic stats on the rest
| of the page. Click an image and you get a bigger version of it
| with download options, all of the tags that apply to it
| specifically, and comments from users.
|
| It's basically as good as it can be.
| pinko wrote:
| Craigslist!
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Came here to suggest this. It's one of the only sites my dad
| (aged in his 80s) can use unassisted and not regularly become
| confused or lost, yet is "ugly" and "has bad UX" (LOL, OK,
| sure) and is certainly information dense.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Some video games have them, mostly the ones with customizable UIs
| like Eve Online [0], World of Warcraft and the like.
|
| "Pro" trading websites, for stocks or cryptocurrencies (e.g.
| Kraken and Coinbase have different interfaces for regular and
| "pro" users)
|
| [0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Panagiotis-
| Zaharias/pub...
|
| [1] https://mtthwx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/wowow.jpg
| (silly example)
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Google now forces designers to make huge interfaces on mobile.
| Tap targets smaller than 54px get a "tap target too small"
| penalty applied to the sites usability score. This score in turn
| can hurt your rankings for mobile searches. Which can in turn
| damage your business. So what are we to do?
| yencabulator wrote:
| The 48x48px touch target is estimated to be ~9mm. That's _tiny_
| for touching by finger, since you can 't see through your
| finger to aim (styluses could do it).
|
| For mobile, look for UX patterns that don't hinge on my big
| thumb hitting a tiny patch of screen. For example, gestures
| like swipe to either side to expose actions for item.
|
| Most of the things talked about in this thread are not mobile
| UIs, and are not limited by such concerns.
|
| And finally, _information_ density can be separate from
| _available action_ density.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| Yeah, I have really big fingers as well. However for web
| forms, this rule really does make everything look too big
| IMHO. There are cascading impacts of these decisions as well,
| a field which is 48px tall must have a significant amount of
| padding around it as well, to look balanced with the field
| size. Typically the rule of thumb i've seen designers use is
| 50% of the field height. When you factor in field label
| sitting above the field things get even bigger. I did however
| recently find a pretty nice solution which moves the field
| label inside the field, allowing for a slightly more compact
| layout while still hitting the tap target size requirements.
| https://m2.material.io/components/text-fields#filled-text-
| fi...
| yencabulator wrote:
| > There are cascading impacts of these decisions as well, a
| field which is 48px tall must have a significant amount of
| padding around it as well, to look balanced with the field
| size.
|
| My podcast app shows a list of episodes etc as just rows
| with only subtle horizontal lines separating them (no
| "cards"). There's 3-4 lines of text with just a little bit
| of whitespace inside each block, a button on the right, and
| dragging the row left/right shows more buttons. Below the
| Android-global-convention top nav there's room for 7
| episodes on my phone's screen size. I genuinely wouldn't
| want the text to be any smaller. The screen is not wide
| enough to use a multi-column grid without wrapping episode
| title text like crazy. Thus, the only way to compact that
| more vertically would be not showing as much metadata
| (date, download size etc seem unnecessary; maybe pinch-zoom
| to expand details of a single row when wanted). I could
| accept that, but even then given my not-great eyesight, the
| icon and episode title take up as much vertical space as
| the button. As long as it displays a recognizable icon, a
| two-line title, and duration and current offset, the button
| will fit just fine.
|
| Mobile just has inherent limitations, both because of small
| screen size and because of inaccurate pointing.
| personjerry wrote:
| When people talk about UI information density it always reminds
| me of this HN discussion about the flight controls on a plane:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702560
| haiku2077 wrote:
| https://www.rockauto.com is the best experience I've had finding
| parts for cars. It's designed so you can find the compatible
| parts as quickly as possibly and organizes the options by price
| range.
| olalonde wrote:
| High density UIs are the norm in China. Check out Meituan,
| Taobao, https://qq.com, https://4399.com, etc.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| PeopleSoft imo, but I haven't tried it since college and have no
| idea if they jumped on the modern, big button for grandpa
| bandwagon.
| sxp wrote:
| Edward Tufte had a good series of books on how to create high
| density infographics: https://www.edwardtufte.com/books/
|
| However, the books are old and specifically call out the low
| resolution computer displays at the time. Does anyone have an
| updated list of references for high density visual information?
|
| Bret Victor's https://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ was a good
| starting point for me.
| x86afficionado wrote:
| sandpile.org
|
| especially the opcode tables
| dbl000 wrote:
| It's not just information density but rather intended use design.
| A lot of engineering/manufacturing parts suppliers tend to have
| good information dense websites that are really catered to their
| customers for finding parts.
|
| Take mouser.com, digikey.com, grainger.com rockauto.com or
| mcmaster.com. They all have a bit of a "landing page" but once
| you go to search for parts you've got something that was really
| designed to be an intuitive parts search. Compare that with
| jameco.com which competes with mouser/digikey but has a more
| classic webshop search system. It's a bit more frustrating to
| use.
|
| Some news sites also do a great job of presenting headlines and
| highlights well in a small area. I think semafor.com is probably
| my current favorite, but I'll readily admit that it's not the
| most information dense.
|
| CAD software also tends to be good at this, but that might be
| just because the UI has chugged along since the 90's.
| AutoCAD/Inventor/Solidworks/SolidEdge/KiCAD/Altium/Virtuoso are
| all great examples where if you've got prior experience with them
| (or even similar software) you can sit down and quickly get up to
| speed on a project and see what's been done. I think the
| distinction is that a lot of software/websites are designed to
| keep the average user focused on a single aspect and so they are
| designed to either remove or hide the complexity but for more
| "professional" level tools you need all that data and
| information. You can probably blame (for better or for worse)
| material UI for a lot of this spaced-out thing. In my mind that
| was the first mobile first UI scheme that really took off and
| it's basically influenced everything that's come sense then.
| Computer first software might be your best bet to get some
| examples. Because a lot of the web is mobile first/mobile forward
| now you probably aren't going to find a lot of examples on that.
| I would love to see examples of information dense mobile first
| sites.
|
| A few other examples I just wanted to brain dump:
|
| - labgopher.com
|
| - tld-list.com
|
| - The Bloomberg Terminal
|
| - Ghidra
|
| - Most plane cockpits, especially modern fighter planes if you
| ever get to see/sit on one.
|
| - A lot of "professional level creative software" - Reaper,
| Affinity
|
| - Train control and monitoring systems
| codingclaws wrote:
| I develop a HN/Reddit clone [0] that has high density settings.
| The home page is fairly high density by default. But if you go
| into the settings [1], then you can really crank up the home page
| UI density by setting posts per page to 50 and post spacing to 2.
| The density is more apparent on desktop since the lines don't
| wrap.
|
| [0] https://www.commentcastles.org
|
| [1] https://www.commentcastles.org/settings
| meew0 wrote:
| Any EMR (electronic medical record) would probably fit this
| description. For example Epic, the leading one in the US:
| https://www.emrsystems.net/epic-ehr-software/ Or Orbis, the
| leading one in Europe: (there's not many good screenshots of it
| online but this PDF has a few)
| https://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Kundeninfos/DE/09/2023/32261...
|
| There's a myriad of other ones as well, they all have similar
| UIs, with the primary goals being to never hide any important
| info from the user, and to let the user take important actions
| quickly. That naturally leads to high density. Nevertheless it
| needs to be reasonably intuitive, since doctors and nurses tend
| to not be very tech-savvy, which leads to some interesting design
| constraints.
| maxverse wrote:
| I worked as an EMR consultant for a few years, helping teach
| medical staff to use these things. The thing that struck me was
| that while some of the UIs look "outdated" by web standards,
| the software often did a great of taking medical staff through
| their daily workflows. I feel like a lot of websites do the
| opposite - they look nice, but using them is a pain.
|
| (Conversely, most staff hated new EMRs, because it enforced
| doing things the hospital wants its staff to do for liability
| and billing, but the staff doesn't want to do - for example,
| asking Maternity nurses to talk to new mothers about smoking
| cessation.)
| Onavo wrote:
| They are infamous for being trash and difficult to use though.
| There's an entire field of "EMR consultants". It's also why
| there's a EMR startup on hacker news every other week.
| rpearl wrote:
| My mom builds EMR workflows for a major hospital and my father
| and sister are doctors (both very tech savvy--my sister has a
| computational bio background for her Bachelor's prior to her
| MD).
|
| None of them have anything _good_ to say about Epic.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Definitely https://lichess.org
| csomar wrote:
| If you are looking for a UI framework, checkout IBM Carbon:
| https://carbondesignsystem.com
|
| I used it to build a merge conflict tool: https://codeinput.com
| and while it required a much deeper understanding than just
| reading the docs (tons of bugs), it is by far the most
| comprehensive UI framework out there. Most UIs either lack _lots_
| of components or are made by a couple front-end /react/css guys.
| This inevitably means that they lack research into things like
| typography, accessibility, patterns, etc..
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I thought about carbon too, but unfortunately it gives me
| extreme IBM cloud ptsd. The number of bad associations products
| building on that design system have to start with is probably
| not worth the time savings.
| csomar wrote:
| I am not sure there is that many people (beside IBM) that are
| using it. In fact, they have a pretty much dead Discord
| channel with very few users. My only explanation was either
| people didn't like the very corporate style or that it had a
| steep initial cost to implement.
|
| > but unfortunately it gives me extreme IBM cloud ptsd
|
| Sure. It did give me some of that PTSD but then _every_ UI
| framework I struggled with had lacking that gave me severe
| headaches. At some point I realized that Carbon is not that
| bad after all.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I brought it to production and had to fork some packages
| due to incomplete APIs, and there was a lot of glue code
| and writing custom components because the existing ones
| didn't meet my needs. It looks great but in the end it took
| more of a backseat than I'd have wished. But under the
| hood, the architecture of the current major version is
| great. Clean, modern best practices, especially regarding
| styling.
| adithyareddy wrote:
| Palantir's Blueprint UI toolkit might scratch the same itch
| if you're looking to build very functional, dense UIs:
| https://blueprintjs.com/docs/
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Lol, they managed to use the word "AI" 12 times in the landing
| page of an UI framework...
| insin wrote:
| "AI" on landing pages is doing numbers of reps the old
| "seamless" and "effortless" tag-team could only dream of. I
| hate it.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| One of the motivations i build lanes.pm (a project management
| tool) was to counter that the only information dense UIs still
| being around seem to be spreadsheets / table views. Tables have
| their place but also lots of drawbacks for many workflows. One
| other great example is ableton live and a few other pro video/
| 3d/ music suites. Especially ableton live is as dense as possible
| while still feeling elegant without tripping over or feeling
| fiddly.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Software made for professionals/power users in the late 90s/early
| 2000s. Microsoft Project 2000, Total Commander, Borland Delphi
| IDE, Final Cut before version 10, older versions of Adobe
| AfterEffects...
| nathanmcrae wrote:
| Aeronautical charts have incredible information density.
| https://skyvector.com/ for zoomable charts
| postalcoder wrote:
| I'm working on a Hacker News front page with the idea of UI
| density as a foundational concept.
|
| https://hcker.news
|
| I haven't did a Show HN yet but I'd love to get some feedback on
| it first.
|
| It's got a lot of configurable views and can be made extremely
| dense (dense mode on + columns: auto). The aesthetic itself was
| made to deviate as little from the HN frontpage as possible.
|
| It's got a lot of filtering knick knacks like being able to view
| by top comments/points, view hn as a timeline of top stories by
| comments or stories or view hn by top n over
| day/week/month/year/custom.
| dang wrote:
| How do you decide which stories to include in the list for a
| given day, and how to rank them?
| postalcoder wrote:
| In timeline mode, it's just a pure top 10/20/50/100 stories
| by points (or comments, if chosen) for each day (in your time
| zone). The stories are presented in chronological order in
| which they were submitted (top is newest).
|
| The timeline view can get wonky when it's like 12AM-2AM when
| there are relatively few stories in "today".
| Misc: 1) it doesn't filter out flagged stories 2)
| second-chance pooled items, should they rise in ranks, will
| be shown on the day the item was originally submitted, not
| the day it got popular.
|
| I may do to a "rising" type of view but I'm curious about
| what others want to see first.
| divbzero wrote:
| Thanks for keeping the HN API open for these alternative UIs.
| dang wrote:
| I think more of this is probably in HN's future, if it's to
| thrive long-term.
| divbzero wrote:
| The official HN front page is already pretty good on UI
| density, so it's promising that you're using that as a starting
| point.
|
| Is there any chance https://hcker.news is related to
| https://hckrnews.com? The dense layout feels similar.
| postalcoder wrote:
| I haven't set up my about page yet but I was going to
| attribute much my design to their page. I've taken a ton of
| inspiration from hckernews.com because it's the front page I
| always frequented prior to making this. My primary issue with
| it was that I wanted more sorting capabilities (aggregate
| mode), and wanted to be able to see the highest engagement
| threads (by comments).
| tbeseda wrote:
| Very cool. I have something similar that's more of a
| running timeline than a view of the front page. I need to
| work on the controls so you can better specify thresholds.
|
| https://hnr.app
|
| (hckrnews.com credit in footer because I also found it
| helpful)
| postalcoder wrote:
| this quite nice as it reminds me of a good ol rss reader.
|
| regarding controls, one of the dumb reasons i wanted to
| remake hckernews is i don't like the two taps to change
| the view.. im happy with the brutalist settings panel up
| top.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One of my biggest gripes against HN's front page is that
| there's so little context to go on --- just an <= 80 character
| headline, often not especially informative.
|
| My own news-page rewrite includes _several paragraphs_ of lede
| context, which is probably a bit on the overkill side. But a
| hundred characters or so should help.
|
| I'm also wrestling with the sort-order aspect. Current cut is
| time-ordered within sections (another thing I wish HN had), but
| I'm going to be extending the article count in the next
| iteration.
|
| That said, your design is clean and light, I like it.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| On first look this looks slightly more usable that
| hckrnews.com, which I'm currently using(mostly).
|
| It would be perfect(for me) if it had some more (light)themes,
| with yellow-brownish background, like 'manila paper', or
| something like that.
|
| Will continue trying it out.
|
| Anyways, thumbs up so far...
| kccqzy wrote:
| The desktop version of Charles Schwab's expert trading platform,
| thinkorswim. Or TWS from Interactive Brokers. Basically these are
| trading platforms designed for day traders and the highest end of
| the retail investors market. These necessarily have to good high-
| information density UIs: imagine trading an option showing all
| strikes (SPX has hundreds of strikes), both calls and puts, and
| showing the option Greeks (delta/gamma/vega) and pricing
| information (bid/ask) for each option. Then you need to give
| users ability to quickly send trades. You need to support complex
| strategies: an iron condor has four legs for example. You need to
| support complex orders like stops and limits and combinations
| thereof and these need to be built via an UI with THEN/AND/OCO
| relationships. Some will want a fast-updating candlestick chart;
| others will want to see the order book; still others will want to
| plot probabilities or expected prices using Black Scholes model.
| It's complex.
|
| You should sign up for paper trading and see these UIs feel like.
| saratogacx wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. I've used TOS for years (2010)
| and it is crammed with info while still being fairly easy to
| use. The fact that you can also group multiple UI elements to
| always show the same symbol (change one, they all follow) lets
| you go a bit nuts in the analysis dashboards you can make.
|
| The TOS mobile app is also not too bad. A couple of years ago
| they tried to add some less data-dense info to the main screen
| and the they got a review riot which caused them to make the
| view optional and untouched sense then.
|
| I've got a lot of respect for them being able to keep that UI
| stable for so long.
| mysteria wrote:
| One thing I like about TWS is that related widgets (could be a
| chart, newsfeed, L2 table, etc.) can be easily linked or
| separated. For example I can link a chart and a newsfeed
| together and if I switch the chart to a specific stock the
| newsfeed will switch over as well. Those widgets can be resized
| and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs
| containing collections of widgets.
| whartung wrote:
| I have to add this.
|
| Back in the day, we sold accounting systems.
|
| Now the beauty of accounting is that everyone needs accounting,
| the fundamentals are all quite solid and common, but even still,
| everyone does accounting differently. Matter of taste of the
| Controller, industry specific bits, etc. While everyone has a
| chart of accounts, no two chart of accounts are the same.
|
| So, anyway, we ate our own dog food, we used our own accounting
| system in house for, you know, accounting stuff.
|
| But the funny thing is that when you opened up the Accounts
| Receivable Invoice screen, and this is on an 80x25 color
| terminal, I would say it was 60%+ a collection of fields
| regarding the invoice. Customer, dates, terms, etc. Probably 20
| fields on that screen, all crammed together, because real estate
| was always an issue on 80x25 terminals.
|
| But, we were a simple business, and the bulk of those fields are
| optional for specific use cases, and those options are based on
| the customer.
|
| So, when you entered in the customer for the invoice, 80% of the
| fields just vanished from the screen. Feature of the system. But
| it made a very busy screen into something quite stark. It doesn't
| resize, it just makes the field go away. The top half of the
| screen was, essentially, blank.
|
| I always found it amusing to see all of that information vanish.
| anteloper wrote:
| https://craigslist.org/
| 91bananas wrote:
| I will go against the grain here and suggest that this UI has
| become gracefully more and more terrible after being pretty
| good like 5-10 years ago. The more they have tried to do the
| worse the core functionality has become.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Try telecom custom service software. Very dense.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I worked on software for doctors to use at clinics for a while
| and hands down those programs have some of the most information
| dense UIs I have ever seen. Doctors want everything possible on a
| single screen, it's wild
|
| Unfortunately I don't really know how to get screenshots or
| examples for you, given the nature of healthcare data privacy and
| such
|
| But I would suggest searching around and seeing what you can find
| for clinic software. I bet you can turn something up
| biofox wrote:
| This is a great example!
|
| In the UK, most GPs use SystmOne. Some screenshots:
|
| https://support-s1.ardens.org.uk/support/solutions/articles/...
| santa_boy wrote:
| Great post. Would love some good samples of "news paper" like
| sites too
| rroose wrote:
| Vitaly Friedman gives a great talk on complex UIs:
| https://youtu.be/2hlQqMigGZg?feature=shared
| carlosjobim wrote:
| BusyCal is a good example: https://www.busymac.com/busycal/
| Jotalea wrote:
| The Geometry Dash level editor. It is far from perfect, but it is
| pretty solid.
| ptspts wrote:
| Is there a high information density (small font size, little
| whitespace, thin window borders, no transparency) GNOME theme,
| ready for everyday use in Ubuntu? Combined with a similar Chrome
| theme and Firefox theme, it would be awesome.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm building my own (for news):
|
| <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122> and
| <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/e919db600cb8013eb7b844...>
| show screenshots and describe the interface.
|
| It's a locally-hosted, personal system, updated manually via
| shell scripts. The prototype is based off of CNN's "lite"
| headlines page (<https://lite.cnn.com/>), which presents 100
| headlines in an unorganised fashion without context.
|
| My first cut simply organised the headlines by section and date.
| The version linked above includes several lede 'graphs for each
| article, along with some other formatting. It runs about 15 or so
| screens on either my desktop or mobile (large-format tablet)
| devices.
|
| I'm looking at extending the concept to other / additional news
| sources, largely as CNN's article offerings are disappointingly
| irrelevant. (Discussed in the Diaspora* thread.)
|
| Features I'm thinking of adding include:
|
| - Bayesian ordering by significance. (This will be based on my
| own article judgements used as training data.)
|
| - A "best of the interval" capability.
|
| - Adding in articles from several alternative sources. _The
| Guardian_ will likely be the baseline given its well-structured
| nature, reasonably comprehensive news, and lack of a paywall.
| There are likely a few other sources I 'll add. I'd like to
| include weather and perhaps some business ticker data as well.
| I've had previous ideas about a "news dashboard" which tracks
| significant indicators, and would like to try applying several of
| those concepts, if my coding chops are up to it.
|
| - Possibly a bit of visual flash, though from what I'm observing,
| virtually all graphics used on news sites are more distraction
| than value.
|
| - Incorporating eInk-Mode:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690828>
| miffe wrote:
| Do an image search for SCADA, they are the most information dense
| systems I've ever worked with.
| camtarn wrote:
| General PLC HMI (Programmable Logic Controller, Human Machine
| Interface) design as well. Here's a good example:
|
| https://rockwellautomation.scene7.com/is/image/rockwellautom...
|
| Not only is this showing details for every tank, valve, pump
| etc in the system, it's also highlighting those which have
| warnings or alarms against them, so the operator knows which
| values are nominal and which ones need action to be taken.
| Depending on the system, you may also be able to tap on each
| value to pop up a dialog which shows that value on a graph,
| lets you set alarm thresholds, or lets you switch a piece of
| equipment from automatic to manual control (from the operator
| station) or local control (from physical buttons on the
| equipment) or maintenance mode (safely locked out).
|
| I'm not claiming that all of these SCADA/PLC HMIs are _good_ ,
| but they're really interesting examples of what a user
| interface can look like when information density and usability
| matters more than being pretty, and where you can require your
| end users to have training to use the system.
| intended wrote:
| Bloomberg terminals.
| codr7 wrote:
| Not a web site, but the best information I've come across on
| information density is Tufte's books.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Here some that comes to mind:
|
| - Portmaster
|
| Url: https://safing.io/
|
| Screenshot:
| https://camo.githubusercontent.com/2f95620e28c8369cdcf94020e...
|
| - UnigetUI https://www.marticliment.com/unigetui/#screenshots
|
| - Mixxx https://mixxx.org/screenshots/
|
| - VMware Workstation
|
| Url: https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-
| hypervisor/workstati...
|
| Screenshot: https://blogs.vmware.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/42/2018/09...
|
| - Pi-hole (scroll down for screenshots) https://pi-hole.net/
|
| - The Movie Database https://www.themoviedb.org
|
| - Steam https://store.steampowered.com/
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| You gave me some more ideas.
|
| Christitus Winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
|
| https://i.imgur.com/v9RiOUI.png
|
| Windows MMC consoles like Computer management, Cert manager
| etc.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/MqbpdBe.jpeg
|
| Windows ADUC Attribute Editor and ADUC in general
|
| https://i.imgur.com/VWrONfD.png
|
| Anything for Windows 2000s server admins before 2012 destroyed
| the UI
| exiguus wrote:
| https://www.bahn.de/ /
| https://www.webpagetest.org/result/250508_AiDc5H_8VR/ Huge
| functionality with minimum cognitive load. IMO a mix of google
| and yahoo. Also the Android/iOS app of bahn.de is very
| intresting.
|
| Articles:
|
| - Density and Audition:
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usa...
|
| - Density is Cultural: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/china-
| website-complexity/
|
| - Conventions: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/breaking-web-
| conventions/
|
| - Information per cm2 https://www.nngroup.com/articles/designing-
| effective-infogra...
| sltr wrote:
| https://www.dict.cc/
| somat wrote:
| I vote blender.
|
| High density can and often is done wrong, but it is often the
| hallmark of interfaces for professional users, an intricate tool
| designed to be used as quick as passable for hours on end, to
| accomplish this you try and reduce intermediate steps. this means
| putting everything up front, redundant panels(to do the same
| thing from different viewpoints), no overlap(why obscure
| information?) etc.
|
| The end product usually ends up being intimidating as hell for
| new users. But is much more ergonomic for experienced ones.
| Curzel wrote:
| Matchbook.com is a good example of something with a lot of
| numbers, the apps are especially good (you might need
| international dns depending on your region)
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps,
| sites)?
|
| Ask that exact same question to someone from the AngloAmerican
| sphere and Japan/Korea. They will answer very differently. This
| is a widely studied cultural communication difference.
| Japan/Korea can handle incredibly dense communictation mediums,
| but AngloAmericans cannot. Neither is wrong, but they are both
| economically important cultural spheres.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Try doing a Google search for "Call center software" or
| "workforce scheduling software" and clicking images.
|
| They have also been victimized by the designers wanting a ton of
| whitespace, but those are both spaces where the customers push
| back.
| paddy_m wrote:
| I call it Trader UI vs VC UI. Traders want as much info jammed
| onto the screen as possible. VC backed companies use bootstrap,
| and want rounded corners on a pricing page with little actual
| information.
|
| I have been working on Buckaroo, a table UI for dataframes that
| runs in jupyter notebooks. It's much more TraderUI, with
| sparkline size histograms, and decent baked in formatting for
| numeric columns.
|
| https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| Great work. Buckaroo looks very slick.
| dheera wrote:
| Chinese end user UIs tend to all be high-density per local user
| preference. Take a look at any of the mini-apps on WeChat or
| AliPay or pretty much any Chinese local app. Almost everything
| is linked within about 1-2 taps of the front page.
| wildzzz wrote:
| When it comes to something you're buying, if it's a novel
| thing, the vendor wants to "chat" because there is no real
| market price so they are going to try to rob you. But if it's a
| commodity, the vendor wants to waste as little of your time as
| possible because they could otherwise lose the sale to any of
| the dozen other vendors selling the same thing for the same
| price.
| czhu12 wrote:
| This is such a nice package, I've been wanting something like
| this forever. I can't believe how clunky it is to just browse
| data in a jupyter notebook, given that its entire purpose is
| for data exploration.
| paddy_m wrote:
| Thank you. I'm putting the finishing touches on auto cleaning
| which integrates with the low code UI. Should be out today
| dleeftink wrote:
| I remain appreciative of Native Instruments' original Massive VST
| [0], which has a good balance of dedicated interaction surfaces
| and tabbing. More recently, I think the Bitwig DAW has become a
| great contender for UI clarity and density (its layout is very
| configurable) [1].
|
| [0]: https://www.native-
| instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...
|
| [1]: https://www.bitwig.com/overview/
| jamesfly wrote:
| I'm making a new version [1] of https://www.physician.fyi that
| has this as a key trait since I'm trying to show medical
| practitioners' complete individual profiles as well as aggregate
| patterns across practitioners. I took inspiration from
| https://www.plasticlist.org. I'm still trying to figure out how
| to integrate the chart(s) and map now, so I'd appreciate any
| ideas.
|
| [1] https://ibb.co/VYQpcz9Z
| maxglute wrote:
| One of my hopes for AI is to read my screen and reflow it into a
| higher density format friendly to screen readers, custom css
| dialed to 11.
| STRML wrote:
| The crypto exchange I built 11 years ago is still pretty dense.
| New users don't love it, but I do. We set the standard.
| https://www.bitmex.com/app
| all2 wrote:
| Looks almost exactly like Kraken's UI.
| eCa wrote:
| This is probably the most densely packed ui I have ever used[1]
| to rename photos from their EXIF data. It's not pretty, but I
| prefer this over a ten step wizard.
|
| [1] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-
| bru/darkmode....
| metalliqaz wrote:
| oh wow, BRU, I had forgotten about that beautiful beast!
|
| Here is another utility that I use every day:
| https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/information/#screens...
| all2 wrote:
| Reminds me of finviz's sorting/selection UI for stocks/funds.
| jumploops wrote:
| For weather data, I'm partial to Wunderground's 10-Day
| forecast[0] view.
|
| In one component you can see temp highs/lows, precipitation,
| cloud cover, humidity, wind speed, etc. by the hour, for the next
| week.
|
| Full disclosure: I worked on this as a junior engineer, the lead
| engineer was fantastic. The code hasn't changed in 10+ years.
|
| [0]https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/ca/san-
| francisco/37...
| vintagedave wrote:
| > Thanks to our past experience with switches, combined with the
| figure-ground principle, a skeuomorphic design for a toggle
| switch will make it obvious to a user how to instantly turn on a
| feature.
|
| (Figure-ground is how we perceive three-dimensionality in a 2D
| space.)
|
| This is one of the best arguments for skeuomorphism I've read. It
| doesn't address the _look_ (ie, brushed metal) but it absolutely
| addresses the _style_ (looks like a real toggle switch, a real
| button, etc.)
| RickS wrote:
| Another vote for ableton. Also After Effects. Comparing legacy vs
| new (rush, etc) Adobe video editing UI is a good way to see both
| of these dynamics in action. I used to work on the UI kits for
| Adobe. We supported multiple densities for this reason.
|
| Something you'll find in both ableton and after effects are
| smart, adaptable panel abstractions/conventions. Both have fairly
| rigid application frames and large distinct sections where
| discrete types of work happen. But they also have panels where
| things can get nearly to a free for all. Think custom video
| effect controls, or individual midi instruments. There are norms
| (knobs look and work similarly), but things can get totally
| custom as well (custom graphs, etc). Lastly, at the very edge
| (~1% of use cases), there are ways to escape the constraints of
| UI entirely. AE has a code editor for things like custom wiggle
| animations. Ableton has M4L (which subsequently supports JS and
| possibly some C, IIRC). You can get yourself into trouble here in
| ways you normally couldn't: it's possible to straight up break
| things.
|
| Greedy whitespace nonwithstanding, the most pernicious modern UI
| trend you'll need to buck is the idea that your UI should be
| simple because it is for simple people. Sometime UI is cluttered
| because of sloppy design or bad abstractions. Sometimes UI is
| cluttered because it's meant to empower people who think and care
| about multiple things simultaneously. Modern UI trends will tell
| you not to serve a man a steak because a baby can't chew it.
| Serve steak, babies be damned.
|
| I guess that was mostly about functionality, and only adjacent to
| density. For actual density: vintage (2016ish?) 538 tables,
| vintage (pre 2010?) stockkeeping and cashier UI. These are
| basically TUIs with just a hair more polish. * Much less text
| heirarchy. This means even line heights, which means easy dense
| grid layouts. Achieve contrast with boldness rather than size,
| side borders, inverted backgrounds, etc. * The opposite extreme:
| very big items for very big tasks. Wide touch areas for each food
| item that a server can rapidfire tap through, everything else
| tucked to the side. * Thoughtful truncation: grid layouts often
| ask that things overflow. Do they elipsis at the end? Do they
| drop the middle? Do they condense 3 pieces of information into 3
| smaller pieces of information? Etc. * Prefer text to icons for
| all buttons, menus, etc. A tab menu of just text is easy to
| parse. Icons add noise, and non-text buttons force users to
| speculate instead of read. * Intentionally non-responsive panels.
| Having fixed sizes for sidebars, panels, etc makes it easier to
| reason about how subcomponents snap to grid, and greatly shrinks
| the workload created by having to allow for fluid item reflow.
| boznz wrote:
| Winamp
| sitkack wrote:
| https://dblp.org/pers?prefix=F
|
| https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?genre=Electronic
|
| https://media.ccc.de/c/38c3
| beau_g wrote:
| Late to the party, but no mention of Winamp? My all time favorite
| UI, masterwork in maximizing utility for it's size
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Simply look into your past...
|
| I have adhd searched for an image I have save of Classic Windows
| XP theme with cmd windows and old Firefox with old unknown web
| ui. Peak. But cant find it.
|
| *Edit - I found it
|
| This is the peak UI - LOOK. Just everything. Windows XP? with
| classic theme and some multi workspace swicther in the corner.
| Small icons, no combine taskbar. SSH/console. Classic Firefox.
| Unknown encoder web UI "BEAST". DENSE.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Sdy3Z5o.jpeg
|
| This is also a collection
|
| https://imgur.com/a/gvnf8jf
|
| Adding Wireshark
|
| https://i.imgur.com/VLSspTw.png
|
| Adding Qbittorrent
|
| https://preview.redd.it/0yukk4ligh5a1.jpg?width=1907&format=...
| shpingbing wrote:
| dmbalmanac.com
|
| very old and not optimized for modern screens, but the density
| always was impressive to me
| malkia wrote:
| Game tools, and in-game dev menus tend to be high-information
| density too.
| delamri wrote:
| Very dense - https://diskprices.com/
| yzmtf2008 wrote:
| Garmin's GI-275: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/719027
|
| This one 3-1/8" inch instrument displays more than 15 pieces of
| information, is somehow perfectly legible even in turbulent
| flight, _and_ is more reliable and accurate than a whole
| 6-pack[1]. Synthetic vision unlock is only $500. This is all
| without switching different pages.
|
| Get two of them, and the FAA considers the possiblities of both
| of them failing at the same time so low, that you can cover one
| of them to satisfy partial panel failures in a checkride - well,
| all you do is to switch the "working" one to the PFD page, and
| you haven't really lost any capabilities!
|
| [1]: https://pilotinstitute.com/six-pack-instruments/
| antonkar wrote:
| Yes, it's great.
|
| The densest UI is a direct democratic simulated multiverse:
| imagine a long exposure photo as a 3D scene, in which you can
| walk or fly.
|
| "Point and scroll the mouse wheel" to focus on a particular
| moment of time, make it crisp, or "scroll back" to see billions
| of years of time as a hazy long exposure scene.
|
| Example: 14 bln years of our planet look like a hazy ocean (our
| planet was a water-world most of the time), with the Sun arcs
| static in the bright sky.
| drinkzima wrote:
| I think the home buying sites do a decent job here for both
| search and drill down.
|
| Redfin search: https://www.redfin.com/zipcode/94110 Redfin
| listing: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/3000-3006-26th-
| St-94...
| mvieira38 wrote:
| An observation from the article: I hate the Bloomberg terminal
| design so much. It's impossible to read if you haven't spent 10+
| hours a day looking at it for the past decade
| throwaway_x031 wrote:
| This webshop is legendary and haven't changed much since the 90s.
|
| https://arngren.net/
|
| It's extremely dense, but not very good
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| I initially built https://plaintextsports.com because I was
| annoyed with how slowly other sports websites loaded, but since
| then I have come to appreciate it more for the density of the
| information, and how few clicks it takes to get to the info you
| care about (usually at most two or three).
| julik wrote:
| Anthony is building MarketMonkey -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYLx1RtvAU Autodesk Flame is a
| great example of fixed-layout high-density UI - (look for
| tutorial videos and screenshots). Maya, Houdini - most apps from
| the high-end VFX space.
| mbo wrote:
| Rate Your Music has a famously divisive UI which would send the
| userbase into open revolt if ever changed. Primary examples:
|
| An artist page: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/stereolab
|
| An album page:
| https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/stereolab/dots-and-l...
|
| I personally adore it - RYM is permanently open on my 3rd monitor
| throughout the work day as I churn through new music.
| jbredeche wrote:
| Bloomberg
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I'm a rover driver / arm operator for Curiosity and we have
| several excellent tools that fit your description here at JPL.
| Chief among them, in my opinion, is RSVP Hyperdrive. See the 5th
| screenshot on https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-
| do/applications/us... . I'm also a developer on RSVP and have
| contributed bug fixes and features to Hyperdrive. I'm hopeful we
| can open-source it someday. (This is my opinion, not JPL or
| Caltech or NASA's opinion)
| nlh wrote:
| This is incredibly cool -- thank you for sharing!
| tintor wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com
| insin wrote:
| Literally usable
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