[1] https://www.mcmaster.com/

- 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)

> 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.)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/10775.Edward_R_Tufte

Still seems worth it, just wondering

Now that I think on it, I haven't seen an ad for them since before the pandemic, so I guess not (in person).

A fly wheel of benefits.

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, noarchive, noimageindex" />

Those numbers could be anywhere, on completely unrelated things. They are not a good search query.

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.

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.

Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer.

The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins.

Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.

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/

They will only put a brand on a product (example: 3M DP420) when it truly comes from a single source and has special meaning/implications.

That said, I order tens of thousands of dollars of McMaster Carr items each year. They almost always come in packages from the OEM with OEM part numbers. So if I want more bolts like that, I just look at the box they were delivered in. The info is just not on the web interface.

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.

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.

In my opinion it is superior to McMaster

On RockAuto, watch out, because they stock some hot garbage.

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?

Of course they are. There's a significant overhead from a virtual DOM and reconciliation with the real DOM. Then there's the larger overhead from relying on JavaScript for everything. The JS VM in modern browsers is very performant, but it can't optimize poorly written code, whether that's from frameworks, the gazillion libraries modern web sites depend on for analytics, trackers, ads, shims, helpers, etc., and, of course, any custom JS specifically written for the web site.

Browsers can enable very rich and responsive interfaces, but web development is bogged down by the insane state of popular frontend stacks. There's a recent trend of rejecting this insanity (htmx, Nue, Datastar), which I hope gets us on a track where we optimize for user experience using native web technologies.

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?!

If there is a UI design award somewhere, they should definitely get it.

example: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/c/?searchTerm=zync+7010

Absolutely no BS. It dumps you right onto the list of car makes.

- 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

(Notable omission: GarbageBand. It has the opposite effect, it instantly puts you into action, but becomes more frustrating the more you use it.)

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#aud...

Creating intuitive interfaces for complex technical controls is challenging. Fabfilter has been a popular developer for years. Oeksound and Denise Audio are great examples too. Newfangled Audio makes good stuff and their limiter elevate handles multiple pages well. They all pack parameters into tight, cohesive UIs that look good and remain intuitive.

Fabfilter often uses submenus that can feel convoluted, but they're arguably necessary given their plugin's depth. Denise Audio takes a different approach with standard, simple UIs across their product line. Everything is visible with no submenus, though they may offer fewer controls overall.

Deciding what controls to expose and how to organize them intuitively presents a unique challenge. Multiple pages like how Newfangled does it works well. I don't find Fabfilter's submenus to be the best but that's often because they are unlabeled and use small, unique icons that are hard to grok. The overall UI for primary features is usually quite good though.

https://www.renoise.com/products/renoise

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...

[1] https://github.com/smola/wine-rhino3d

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.

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.

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)

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.

Like/dislike might be a better description. Then make the chart show color or size to indicate the preferences.

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.

Does that help?

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?

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.

"Click to hold" isn't a good name for the feature, but hopefully the idea makes sense.

Great way to present a large amount of data though

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

So many SaaS business tools have ego-driven UI, where it's all about keeping you in the tool, increasing engagement, etc. The problem is that people buy business tools to improve their productivity, the best tool for a business is one that requires zero time to use and provides some value. You want to get in, get value, and get out as quickly as possible so you can move on to delivering value to your business.

Slack used to be good at this when it was just about IM, but then they became all about replacing other forms of communication... the problem is they weren't as good, some email does need to be email. Engagement went up, but "managing Slack" was a big time sink. My old company trialled Facebook Workplace, and probably because it was built with a social network mindset instead of a productivity tool mindset, it was an immediate time sink with very little value.

There are lots of examples of the flip side, UI that gets out of the way, but they're usually pretty boring.

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...

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.

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.

As a casual user, I used to be able to use their tools fairly proficiently, but now I find them virtually unusable.

Bless Irfanview and Inkscape for having color icons still...

One reason I heard is that color needed to be removed to not alter your color perception when editing a photo.

Somebody forked it and was trying to do just that; I don't know the status of that project.

https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel

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.

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/

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? :)

Alexis and Kevin are already trying to do that with the new Digg. ;)

Lemmy is serving my former reddit needs quite well.

It is absolutely my preferred UI for consuming large amounts of information quickly.

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/371490-reddit-multi-column

And the sole motivation for the redesign? Monetize the content users created. More ads. Force you to see images automatically so ad images and videos show up with the “this is an ad” text below the scroll instead of needing to earn your interest and permission first.

As bad or worse than the shift to algo vs time based social content.

They migrated from that React SPA to Lit web components and the UX still sucks

https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom

[0] https://youtu.be/h0hYYIGryJ4?si=LkBtTVWyomvyEjlM&t=69

https://youtu.be/vi8pyS076a8

You should sign up for paper trading and see these UIs feel like.

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.

Those widgets can be resized and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs with separate layout for each.

Here is a blog post talking about the different ui elements http://nenadmilosevic.co/ableton-live-redesign/

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.

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.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bloomberg_Terminal_M...

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.

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

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.

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...

Yours has a much smoother aesthetic, though I could go for either

[1] https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=44.2705&lon=-7...

"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)

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.

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.

(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.)

None of them have anything good to say about Epic.

The new EMR software was highly configurable, so lots of this happened. Staff teams signed off on it, and had training from the implementation team.

Fewer screens? Check! …Wellll, sorta: some very long scrolling views…which didn't play nice with mousewheels. It would seem like the page randomly and mysteriously stoppe scrolling, then suddenly scroll normally. There were lots of weird data entry errors, from all staff, regardless of prior reputation for accuracy. They were just getting used to new software, right? Nope. I tracked this down to the dropdown lists scattered on the long scrolling pages. As a page scrolled, random lists ate scroll events, changed the list item to either the first or last item, then permitted scrolling to continue.

Fonts worked mostly great…except some of the typefaces follow the should-be-criminal design of allowing various characters to to look identical. Font sizing worked as expected. I think Pre-cert desk liked Candara, for the way numbers stood out.

Notes fields…these were our downfall, sometimes multiple times per day. Anything put into them was inserted as raw text into SQL:

Patient said xxxxxxx -- ESR

…or…

something-something 'quoted thing'

…would mean the database locked up, no exams savable or queryable, no patient intake, no checkout until I.T. admin could fix it. The implementation team was gone, and non-responsive, so sticky notes with a list of forbidden characters seemed to be everywhere.

I believe some contracts for referrals were lost, due to delays and errors. Some staff quit, after months of no fixes. But I later heard from one of the most affected staffers that the same EMR software was installed at our biggest competitor, and no issues at all.

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..

> 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.

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.

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.

  > 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.

That said, power laws and Zipf functions apply, and a large fraction of HN front-page articles come from a relatively small set of domains. There's further aggregation possible when underlying publishing engines can be identified, e.g., Wordpress, CMSes used by a large number of news organisations, Medium, Substack, Github, Gitlab, Fediverse servers, and a number of static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, Gatsby, etc.).

I suspect you're aware of most of this.

I have a set of front-page sites from an earlier scraping project:

(For the life of me I cannot remember what the 3rd column represents, though it may be a miscalculated cumulative percentage. The "category" field was manually supplied by me, every site with > 17 appearances has one, as well as several below that threshold which could be identified by other means, e.g., regexes on blogging engines, GitHub pages, etc.)

  Rank  Count    ???  Site :::: Category
  ------------------------------------------------------------- 
     1  7294   5.175  n/a :::: n/a
     2  3803   7.873  nytimes.com :::: general news
     3  3495  10.352  techcrunch.com :::: tech news
     4  1580  11.473  arstechnica.com :::: tech news
     5  1344  12.426  bloomberg.com :::: business news
     6  1288  13.340  wired.com :::: tech news
     7  1171  14.171  wsj.com :::: business news
     8  1099  14.951  youtube.com :::: video
     9  1026  15.678  wikipedia.org :::: general info (wiki)
    10   921  16.332  bbc.com :::: general news
    11   911  16.978  bbc.co.uk :::: general news
    12   893  17.612  theguardian.com :::: general news
    13   866  18.226  washingtonpost.com :::: general news
    14   846  18.826  reuters.com :::: general news
    15   829  19.414  economist.com :::: business news
    16   781  19.968  theatlantic.com :::: general interest
    17   631  20.416  arxiv.org :::: academic / science
    18   628  20.862  npr.org :::: general news
    19   622  21.303  nature.com :::: academic / science
    20   614  21.738  newyorker.com :::: general interest
    21   505  22.097  eff.org :::: law
    22   475  22.434  stanford.edu :::: academic / science
    23   471  22.768  ieee.org :::: technology
    24   456  23.091  reddit.com :::: general discussion
    25   448  23.409  amazon.com :::: corporate comm.
    26   445  23.725  microsoft.com :::: technology
    27   416  24.020  theverge.com :::: tech news
    28   410  24.311  venturebeat.com :::: business news
    29   408  24.600  quantamagazine.org :::: academic / science
    30   407  24.889  cnn.com :::: general news

More on that project in an HN search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

(Individual comments/posts seem presently unreachable due to an HN site bug.)

I'm using something along these lines right now to process sections within a given source, where I define the section-distinguishing-element from a headline URL, as well as the plaintext, position (within my generated page), lines of context, and maximum age (days) I'm interested in.

That could be extended or paired with a per-source rule that identifies the htmlq specifiers which pull out title, dateline, and byline elements from the source.

A further challenge is that such specifiers have a tendency to change as the publisher's back-end CMS varies, and finding ways to identify those is ... difficult.

But grist for the mill, at any rate.

Is there any chance https://hcker.news is related to https://hckrnews.com? The dense layout feels similar.

https://hnr.app

(hckrnews.com credit in footer because I also found it helpful)

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.

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.

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...

Thank You!

Edit: After a few minutes I'm thinking its better than both hckrnews.com, because that has too bright BG, and less disturbing than HN, because no jump between grey borders and that pale yellow they use. MUCH LESS annoyance/eyestrain.

Also, I'll also have to fix the fact that I've been misspelling "manila". Feel free to email me (in the about page) if there are any other features you'd like to see.

- 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/

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

--

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

2: https://rerun.io/viewer

- Mixx: https://mixxx.org/screenshots/

- darktable: https://www.darktable.org/about/screenshots/

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.

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.

[1] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/darkmode....

Here is another utility that I use every day: https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/information/#screens...

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

[0] https://assets.bbhub.io/image/v1/resize?width=auto&type=webp...

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...

They have also been victimized by the designers wanting a ton of whitespace, but those are both spaces where the customers push back.

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

In the UK, most GPs use SystmOne. Some screenshots:

https://support-s1.ardens.org.uk/support/solutions/articles/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702560

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/

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.

https://engdata.com/

I made this UI for realtime ham radio signal spotting a couple of years ago, which was an interesting challenge in that regard: https://ft8.live

I used Ant Design and Deck.gl for this which are both quite good for building dense UIs and data visualisation platforms