Hacker News Reader

Comment by teknologist | Hacker News Reader

I feel internal business applications can be visually appealing too. People have to look at these things all day, so why are we so quick to assert that these people are practically robots who can't appreciate comfortable interfaces when we design and build boring apps?

Life can look good all over. Don't succumb to this "business is serious and should therefore be dull and boring" stuff.

View on HN

I think they're going for a different kind of boring than what you're implying. It doesn't have fancy animations and flashy colors like Bootstrap and Foundation. It's simple, clean, fast and straight to the point, which is something valuable in an internal tool.

Bootstrap doesn't have animations, not that I know of, and I think its colors (though kind of cliché by now) convey information pretty well.

I somewhat agree, in a previous job, one of the products I supported was Sharepoint. Which when you have the Document Management features, work flows, and Infopath forms is a really powerful tool. But sharepoint had a reputation on campus of being annoying and hard to use, and I think a lot of that came from the technical team that originally implemented it got somethings wrong to start with. But those of us in the customer service departments, who were tasked with building services for our customers on top of sharepoint, focused to much on making it technically functional and not functional and easy to use from a user perspective. I'd say if some of the UI bits in our sharepoint services looked more like this and less like what we provided, then Sharepoint would have been a much eaiser sale. It would also have probably helped the resentment from users when we told them that "No, because of the type of information this is, we can't put it in google drive or Google Forms".

That's not why people make boring business applications. It's because they've decided that making it pretty does not add enough value to justify the costs.

In my opinion, the design importance grows with the number of users.

I think that it looks clean and like it'd be easy to look at all day than something that's flashy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com