A busy discussion bubbled up in the usability community recently regarding a trip logging app a company developed for the iPhone.  The UI’s front screen is quite busy and tons of people rapidly chimed in to criticize the design on Flickr.  The creator responded by pointing out that the design, while busy, is optimized to let you accomplish the task that you would use the app for 90% of the time (not the other 10%) linearly in one shot.  No need to use menus, tabs or change screens.  His response was later reviewed on the 37signals blog, discussing the balance between a well-designed screen that’s busy but effective and a poorly-designed screen that’s clean and simple but inefficient for daily use.

For what it’s worth, I think both sides of the argument are right on this one.  The developer clearly knows his customers well and designed something with a very low threshold for effective use.  However, the use of color and some of the spacing and alignment seem to add confusion and distraction to the UI.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.  One of my favorite Trading Grid Online screens walks the line as well.  Admin users have access to a “User Action History” feature which shows actions taken by users on your account within 90 days and even includes correlation by session.  I spent quite a few iterations with the engineers working on an AJAX-based UI intended to allow searching, results and detail displays within a single page.

Metadata for user actions is more compact than most transactional data (EDI or XML contents or, if you’re feeling plucky, JPEG headers and binary data!), so we ultimately took this approach to allow an admin or support user to easily locate, correlate and review actions without having to change pages in the process.  We reasoned that users are mostly checking audit logs when there’s an issue and this often involves a phone call or conversation with another involved party.  Browser refresh page changes, while engaged in dialog, often cause users to lose their place or train of thought so we used a little more real estate to keep continuity across actions–a big help when you’re partially distracted.

Don’t believe me, though.  Check it out for yourself.  If you’re not a TGO user, you’ll have to settle for a little screenshot (session IDs and innocent internal test account IDs removed ).

Search results, filtering, pagination and item views use AJAX to reload live in the current view, so the screen maintains its overall state.   Slick stuff.