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.
Another way of breaking this down, is UI that gets out of the way, and UI with a big ego.
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.
Here, here. The only time you notice the air vents in your car is when they're poorly designed, and you can't figure out how to adjust them without looking at them. Nobody ever notices well-designed air vents.
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.
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.
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.
It works in Marimo, Colab, VSCode. The js library that wraps community AG-Grid is also a seaparate package, though not on NPM because there isn't interest yet.
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