[pmontra]

The demo screen is a dealbreaker. It's an admin tool. The new interface shows 8 models. The old one has space for at least twice as much. Imagine if Excel had that amount of padding. A 8x4 grid would fill the screen. A 1x2 grid on a phone.

To all designers reading this: We are not printing those screens to frame them. We're using admin tools to do real work and we want to see lots of information there to be fast. Maybe we created those models ourselves. We know what to look for. I'm sure that Django admin could be made to look better and some UX could be improved. It's in part theming and in part redesigning the control flow. Taking on the latter would be really interesting.

Edit: actually a problem with the home page of Django admin is that it doesn't show enough information. A full screen browser window displays a column of models and a lot of useless white space. A multi columnar layout would speedup navigation by displaying more models in one screen. And a search filter.

[mperham]

Any designer who does not understand and value the information density in the design of a tool like this fundamentally does not understand how the tool is used.

[mst]

This sort of thing finally started making sense after I read this: https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

[y4mi]

the image preview is hidden on mobile, even though its the objectively most important information on the landing page. I can somewhat understand it, because its probably hard to put it on that page while still keeping the clean look. But it doesn't instill confidence in their design choices for an admin panel either, honestly.

I can see that some people would prefer this aesthetic, even though i'd agree that having an admin panel with low information density is kinda pointless

[manigandham]

This is the biggest problem with modern UIs and "material" design. Too much whitespace, with actions being hidden behind multiple menus and taking lots of mouse travel and clicks to do anything.

[klysm]

More examples of why it’s incredibly important to always empathize with your user and their _needs_.