10 inspiring admin interfaces | Hacker News Reader

10 inspiring admin interfaces

nemetral.net

25 pointsjmorin00711 comments

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Somewhat irrelevant:

On mosso... except for when you need to "dynamically" create subdomains

Not to mention being slow and sprinkled with a good helping of errors every other page.

I stopped reading once I saw mosso made the list.

I continued to read on, only to see that most of the remaining look like either Backpack or Basecamp rip-offs.

The best admin interfaces are ugly as shit, but work quickly and efficiently and require almost no training.

Good things don't have to be ugly. Pretty things can be quick and efficient. Some don't even require any training.

I've never understood the bias against aesthetic among hackers.

I read that as an observation, not opinion. The interfaces that are the best end up ugly, not that ugly interfaces are the best. Not because they need to be ugly, not because quick and efficient means ugly, not because ugly means doesn't require training, and not because there is a bias against aesthetics among hackers. They are ugly because no one actually cares what the admin interface looks like as long as it gets the job done.

As for hackers having a bias against aesthetics, I find this to be false. There is beauty in efficiency independent of looks. Getting the job done and being able to go home gives people pleasure. Concentrating on the veneer of the UI while ignoring user productivity is not providing a decent user experience, because a large portion of the user experience is based on getting the end results, not on the trip to get there. The chore of going to the supermarket is not made significantly better by taking the scenic route or having the building that houses it be designed by some big name architect, it's made better by minimizing the time it takes to perform (efficiency).

But to that degree, the most efficient designs require thought. For instance, people react to some typography different than they do to others. To different colors. Programs that don't think about that tend to miss out on some fairly obvious design things that stand out like a sore thumb.

Or the systems that don't think about that don't think about it because it doesn't matter one way or an other towards efficiency. There is such a thing as overthinking the interface.

The efficiency of well formatted data plus SQL or a sweet, sweet UNIX pipeline is so stupidly efficient compared to using Excel for the same task for any amount of data worth mentioning isn't even measured in units of orders-of-magnitude-better. Font and color selection doesn't even come into play with some user experience situations, and programs that attempt to control that when it doesn't make sense to seem petty and illfocused from the real goal.

Props for its mentioning Symphony. Excellent little CMS.

SharePoint?

The Sharepoint Central Administration web interface is not easy nor sexy to use. Most of the time you'll have to use the CLI STSADM instead, as simple tasks requires loads of clicks.

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