alt Hacker NewsYeah, I think this is something a lot folks miss when doing UI/UX these days. There’s an immense focus on new users, not on folks who rely on it day in and day out for actual work. I’ve seen loads of old, incredibly “ugly” UIs that absolutely mog newer friendlier attempts at the same. They’re absolutely intimidating to new users, but once folks learn it they’re indispensable and obviously intentional.
I really wish there was a resurgence of information dense UIs and tools, optimizing for people who use them daily and not “use it once.” It really reminds me of the hate folks have for things like Eclipse or IntelliJ which are daunting at first but once you get over the shock and learn them really are amazing tools.
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I think that's the 'push/pull' problem though. Information dense UI that takes months or years to learn, or something that may be less information dense, but a monkey can learn it in minutes.
For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.
So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"
You’re reminding me of this thread I found a long time ago where someone was talking about the old amber-screen library computers that felt FAST. The gif here shows what it would look like to read Twitter in that manner… https://x.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552
https://x.com/scottew/status/1751357591375208689
The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.
Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.