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Comment by LooseEquipment | Hacker News Reader

inconsistent and maybe too tight, but I would think those are issues with the sample UIs and not this library

FWIW if you listen to Signals and Threads (the Jane Street podcast) they talk about this.

They have dedicated UX designers who do relatively little code but focus entirely on making the UX as optimal for the traders as possible and one of them was on an episode.

They talked about how most of the normal UX rules for SW go out the window because quants and traders have such different needs than "normal software".

This matters. Beyond performance (a universal good), the definition of "good" UX is strictly dependent on the user. Fintech platforms for traders who open a multi-window thick client application(s) and spend hours in it every day have little in common with consumer mobile apps designed to hold your attention for maybe a minute. It's mind-bogglingly lazy to choose something like MUI (Material UI) as if it were some kind of reasonable foundation irrespective of context.

Is there any professional software that wouldn't benefit from high information density? Most software design is optimized for the non-users who have to approve it.

You can have high information density and still not have words running into each-other. Taking all of the space out from around text and information graphics makes them less legible, even for experienced "power users".

I think the goal here is more an aesthetic of being for "serious traders only" rather than a UI optimized for speed and clarity. The UI designers probably have little choice but to match the preferences of the user group though, even when those preferences are empirically detrimental.

Yeah safety critical software needs to avoid high UI density for the interface itself. For diagnostics and monitoring or general stats you can still do high density but the actual "action space" needs to be kept as low density as possible and preferably with physical separation in the UI (i.e. via physical buttons and displays instead of just a big touch screen or monitor+Mouse and kbd).

Higher information density is ideal but when people are working in less than ideal conditions (stress, lack of sleep, alarms going off, etc) you need to prioritise information clarity and clarity of actions over raw density.

"non-users" are also big targets for software. If you run a software business, chances are you want people who've never used your software to start using your software. In that case, discoverability trumps high information density.

It only adds discoverability for the things that fit the screen. In other words, you have to make it simple. I.e. the lazy way to make something "user-friendly", do as little as possible and force the user to adapt to your ways instead.

It has to be the right information, filtered and presented in such a way that supports the task. Any kind of human in the loop UI has to manage user cognitive loading. Task saturation is real.

this - most of the internal software at my job that's actually important is very dense, with keyboard navigation and shortcuts. The ones that somebody makes to sell themselves to upper management while angling for a promotion look very pretty, and never get used.

And yet, we make such beautiful and vacant software ourselves for our clients, because again, its b2b, so you aren't selling to the people who actually have to use the software. Im glad at least we arent forced that often to use specific internal tools, the better ones just get adopted organically

Fair point

I guess JS doesn't have to care about this at all because they're not selling their UI to others, just making it in house for in house use

JavaScript?

No, OCaml

Think node, except the other direction. They write their backend in OCaml, and then they also write their web ui in OCaml with a translation layer

Or think of gwt (java) awhile back

JaneStreet, see post title.

I'd kill for tight UIs now. Everything insists on having 15000-mile wide margins, and at most two items visible on an 8K screen.

We are at a point when TUIs from 1990s running in 12" screens with at best a 480x240 resolution display more info than almost anything we have now.

This makes me think about the bizarre UI regressions in macOS in the last few years. I’ve got this giant, beautiful display and somehow it becomes less rather than more useful over time due to the software it’s presenting.

I'm on the verge of swapping my macbook for a framework laptop. I never really bought into the whole apple ecosystem (I've got a pixel phone), and I find myself using the mac as a less flexible unix box. I'm mostly in the terminal, vscode, or firefox, and using rectangle and homebrew to make it more linux-y to interact with. I'd swapped to the mac because it was a more reliable hardware setup than any linux laptops at the time, but I'm starting to look for other options.

i think wayland set linux desktop back 10 years. it’s finally coming up to parity with X11. but basic stuff like “get the latest release of of consumer GUI app $foo” is still weirdly mired in odd political plays between flat pack people, distros, and the actual devs. at least audio finally seems to be solved with pipe wire!

Yeah, that was the main attraction of a mac for me. It Just Works, but enough stuff is packaged for it that it can drive like a linux box for a lot of coding tasks. I'm not going back to windows anytime soon, either.

I remember getting in to all kinds of driver rabbit holes every other time I tried to run desktop linux, but a bunch of people I was talking to on here a few weeks ago were saying that's all fixed now.

2026 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop.

I feel like everything has become a wasteland of whitespace. JIRA is a prime offender here.

From experience I can say that traders prefer extraordinarily little whitespace in their UIs.

A lot is said in this thread about user preferences for info density, but it is really a lot more than preference. there's also a big component of it that is user productivity focused. Info-dense UIs simply require a lot less scrolling around and pagination to look at relevant data. For example the ability to look at multiple charts side by side instead of having to scroll one chart after another into position enables users to spot differences that they wouldn't otherwise see.

Margins on an info dashboard are wasted space.

Probably because they skew towards higher information density

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