[nulagrithom]

> Users absolutely hated the new system.

I feel like this is a universal absolute, doubly so when it comes to enterprise apps (the lone exception being when we switched from Lotus Notes to Gmail -- then only half the company hated the change).

I would've liked to know how long the changes were in place and how it affected productivity metrics, especially the amount of training time spent on new users. As is, the article seems kind of obvious. Enterprise users abhor change; who knew?

> Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!)

This also makes me question the veracity of the article. It's a really terrible metaphor that makes me wonder if they were _solely_ concerned with pretty design on the outset.

I want a dictionary that shows me 1 word per page, with a search bar. The page flipping functionality is useless and can be removed entirely. It's a bad workflow.

I can definitely say that over the past 20 years, our in-house LoB app has developed some really bad workflows as well (business changes a lot over 20 years). Removing these bad workflows would give us back a ton of screen real estate without losing productivity.

The causality is backwards. I don't want to create whitespace by changing the design and ruining the functionality. I want to change the functionality which will create more whitespace and allow room for beautiful design.

[Aardwolf]

>> Just like you wouldn’t appreciate a dictionary with only 10 words per page (so many pages to flip through!)

> This also makes me question the veracity of the article.

Personally I thought the opposite, I find it a fantastic quote from the article as it exactly describes the problem:

Things that used to take a single click taking multiple clicks with slow animations between them because "design" and information not anymore visible on one page even though the human visual system is very well optimized to deal with that vs waiting for multiple screens.

[frosted-flakes]

He's talking about a dead tree dictionary, not a piece of software. While I largely agree with you, adding a search bar to a book isn't possible.

[JoshuaDavid]

You can come surprisingly close with indexes and glossaries.