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by matte_black
3045 days ago
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This is consumer app mentality. Enterprise apps are expert systems, they are not designed for the masses. Your goal is not to surprise and delight, your goal is to help people get shit done and go home. That means data needs to be organized tightly and densely, forms often have a lot of inputs, tables often have a lot of columns and tons of rows. A simple separator line between rows and columns, and perhaps alternating background colors for even and odd rows is all you need. Think something that looks more like an Excel spreadsheet, and not some social network with documents. If a new feature is needed, it needs to plug straight into the existing design wherever there is space. There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just confuse an employee who got used to the previous one. |
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Here, take a look at this example and tell me that the left paragraph is something you would use or want in an enterprise application: https://imgur.com/a/mIBZz
> There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just confuse an employee who got used to the previous one.
I very much disagree and have experience with such tasks.
One of my main task right now is to manage an in-house ERP. Before I started to work here, there were no front-end developer, no UX expert and no designer.
Every screen was a pizza. The previous developers simply piled on changes and everything quickly became a mess.
Last year, we changed half of the screens (early 2000 style) to modern user interfaces. Out of the ~150 employees working with the software, only one was resistant to change. It was one of the newest hires and had just been trained with the previous version of the screens.
Two months in, she admited that the newest version was way easier to use and that she would have had an easier time training on it. Everyone else simply adjusted easily from the cramped design of the previous version.
Smart use of white space isn't about making everything like one of Apple's websites. It's about managing your negative space in such a way as to guide the eyes of the end user.