
Ask HN: Your favorite web application design/UI? - abinoda
I'm redesigning my web application — it's a SAAS app for project management — right now it looks too similar to Basecamp but I'm having trouble breaking out of the tabs-content-sidebar look.<p>I'm thinking of going with a totally different style.. inspired by http://www.alfredapp.com/<p>Big type, top-to-bottom, full screen.<p>What are some of your favorite web application user-interfaces + designs?
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joelburget
Jason Santa Maria is the only designer whose rss feed I'm subscribed to. Check
his porfolio for some projects you'll probably recognize.

<http://jasonsantamaria.com/>

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raheemm
I went to check his portfolio and noticed one of his works is dictionary.com -
he lists it under website design. Not sure what happened but dictionary.com is
an awful site!

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muhfuhkuh
I just went there. Seems pretty okay to me. If you mean those click-popups
that drive everyone crazy, that's not the designer's fault.

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threepointone
While it created a lot of dissatisfied customers, I truly loved the redesign
for <http://www.thesixtyone.com/> beautiful stuff.

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bherms
Whoa! I hadn't been on the site in ages. The design is nuts! I think it's
beautiful, yes, but much less functional.

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CPops
When I first saw the redesign of TheSixtyOne, I also thought it was nuts; a
classic case of web-design by graphic-designer.

But then I realized that it's an amazing solution to the problem they're
trying to solve; discovering new music.

You're shown just one song (you've likely never heard of before) at a time.

You either like it and listen to it, or move on to the next.

You can't physically listen to more than one song at once, so you move
everything to individual pages.

TheSixtyOne's design can be improved a bit, sure, but the overall concept is
brilliant.

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MrAlmostWrong
I know this isn't what you asked for, but it sounds like you are trying to
find a design that you will wedge your content into. Let the content dictate
the design.

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fjabre
Love the Alfred app design. I bookmarked it when it first came out. It
inspired me to do a very logo centric design for my web app:

<plug> <http://www.HobsonFiles.com> </plug>

So did <http://mailchimp.com>. I've always been impressed by how much
personality their web app has while actually doing something very useful.

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masterj
Re: HobsonFiles.com

Isn't that a bit wide of a design? I would think that the average person would
have to scroll left and right to see it all. I did, at least, and it took me
by surprise.

Edit: In reference to the landing page.

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budu3
I like Quora and github. Nice clean designs.

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raheemm
I find that most YC funded companies have great designs/UIs. Some that spring
to mind are airbnb, hipmunk, etc.

Here is a list of YC funded companies (look on bottom left column under
investments) - <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator>

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keithwarren
<http://www.campaignmonitor.com/>

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summero
<http://forrst.com/> & <http://carbonmade.com/> & <http://gowalla.com/>

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ikhare
A couple of comments here have liquid card based layouts
(<http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library>,
<http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs>). To add to the list of this
type of design check out <http://pinterest.com/>. That site does a great job
in showing and discovering collections.

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johnglasgow
<http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs>

I always start at PatternTap.com when I'm stumped on a design solution.

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jjcm
Redmine does a great job for a web application in being easy to use out of the
box, while handling loads of data as well. With the amount of stuff it does,
it could very easily be convoluted and spiteful to its users. Instead it's
quite easy to use and logical in it's layout. It's not pretty, mind you, but
it's functional.

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dinkumthinkum
Not sure. But I think I am tired of the "Web 2.0 aesthetic" or whatever people
are calling it these days. It's bland, boring, and done. Sometimes that is a
good thing but it is almost just too cliche for me at this point. I don't hate
it and don't think it's the worst decision to go that route, I'm just tired of
it.

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hkuo
Perhaps not appropriate for your app, but who knows, maybe? But this is my
favorite UI that I've seen in a very long time. Just click on any of the
content boxes.

<http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library>

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wccrawford
That site has one of my pet peeves. At the top, there is a Flash element.
Wanting to see the full site design, I allowed Flash to run on the page. What
did I see?

Text.

Just text.

At worst, it would have taken a PNG to produce the same thing, but they
decided to create an entire Flash app devoted to displaying some text.

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BerislavLopac
Actually I think this is one of those Flash-based font substitution tricks.
Although I wonder why anyone would still use that now cufon is available...

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joshuacc
Many (most?) commercial font licenses prohibit embedding fonts via Cufon or
other non-Flash solutions.

Typekit, Fontdeck, etc. are helping to fix this problem, but it takes time.

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SHOwnsYou
<http://icontact.com> has a smart design

The first thing that hits you is a sliding list of benefits + social proof on
each slide + prominent buttons for a free trial and a video tour.

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bradhe
I'm not a Rubyist, but 37signals' (clickable: <http://37signals.com/>) new
design is really great to me. It's clean and extremely functional.

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cmelbye
I'm confused, why would one need to be a Rubyist to appreciate 37signals' new
home page design?

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bradhe
Isn't 37signals like Rubyist central?

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anarchitect
You might find some useful links in this thread...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282024>

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bherms
I like the <http://invoicemachine.com> web app interface.

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ashitvora
Basecamp, Wufoo, Reddit (If you are not looking at Visual Design but Good
Design)

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robwgibbons
I love Reddit, but I've never thought it was a good design.

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ashitvora
It is not visually appealing but it has good user experience. You will hardly
make any mistakes while using it. They concentrated more on making it clean.

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snissn
if anyone is interested in the concept behind this thread, this was my intent
for starting <http://reddit.com/r/prettywebsites> which is since out of date

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seanMeverett
looks like the new 37signals homepage

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vrikhter
Clockspot.com

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korch
Craigslist.

Take the 10+ billion web pages out there, zoom in on the top 100 by traffic,
which one is _effectively_ used by the maximum number of people for non-
trivial tasks?

Craigslist is at or among the very top of the list. I don't count Google,
which is meta—they are a "portal" of the web. I discount Facebook for the same
reason, as well as being 99.999% used for trivial tasks(teenagers sharing
stupid photos, etc).

Think of web users as a strictly economical _force_ , and ask which web site
has the most real-world impact? Craigslist is 99% about real-world money
changing hands. Buyer, meet Seller. Google, Facebook, the Silicon Valley
Bubble Chamber, and almost all the biggest web properties/brands on the web
are _derivative_ products. Their value is based on the value of something
else, or the value of a collection of something else.

I often wish Craiglist would add a simple counter to their site displaying a
total value of good exchanged, similar to what many new sites show. Even if
only a fraction of commercial exchanges could be tracked through some half-
hacked manner, I bet that dollar amount would be a very large and surprising
number.

Craigslist loses all design awards. This is true. It is an eternal relic
enshrining HTML web design circa 1999, it has a hideous, redundant UI, it
mercilessly makes users do too much work to sift and sort through what's out
there, and provides no tools to lessen at least some of the work. And there's
no way to extend or scale it it beyond doing individual, in-person
transactions. Yet Craigslist blithely meanders on its merry way in 2010
without needing to partner or integrate with any other major web properties,
any "Tech Coast" corps, any telecoms, nor are they beholden to Wall St in any
way.

Name one other site that defeats this same set of constraints?

As for how this relates to design proper, the best _designs_ are those you
don't even see, and which optimize some set of material constraints that you
don't even know about.

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dinkumthinkum
Wouldn't ebay be closer to "99% about real-world money changing hands?"
Craigslist is fine but isn't it more about sex and Nigerian scams? Not to dig
too much at Craigslist but I don't think this gets to what the OP is asking
about.

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AuroraSnow
www.playmycam.com

