How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet (blog.gingerbeardman.com)

Nothing wrong with something that works... I used Balsamiq for years for this type of thing, but to each their own.

Note: not a fan of Balsamiq's current rent model... I bought a long time ago when it was < $100 for a regular license/download. Been a while since I used it.

As an appellate attorney, when I'm dealing with my own legal writing or someone else's, I similarly break it down into the mental models of layout, structure, content, style, and the tools/software used to work with the documents.

I love to use spreadsheets for prototyping too! 1) moving around a spreadsheet is very fast and lightweight 2) it forces you to think about layout first, before getting into imagery, colors and design

The overall effect of Figma is probably net-negative because people start futzing with the visual/aesthetic aspects of an interface instead of working out the functional aspect as you would in a low-fidelity/paper/wireframe prototype.

i admire the people who are able to bend the spreadsheets to their will while i struggle with creating simple charts with it! i even created my own tool to create charts from it because i found spreadsheet interface overwhelming.

I have used spreadsheets for designing floor plans and building elevation etc. I used each cell to represent 3 inch by 3 inch area. In more detail views I used each cell for a square inch area.

Spreadsheets (specifically Excel) are the most general-purpose end-user software I have ever seen. I saw people using it for art/painting. Someone used it for demonstrating graphics shaders and ray-tracing.

This is quite brilliant. Good read!

I’ve never used spreadsheets for prototyping but I’ve used slides. Those have a grid system too – you just need to toggle its visibility and enable “snap to grid.”

~2008 a friend at a consulting co. showed me how they drafted UIs in Excel.

Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design.

If you'd like to try it it's free: https://uxtly.com

Love this. Personally I like Excalidraw [0] for UI mock-ups but I might use a Google Sheet next time for sharing/multiplayer purposes.

[0] https://excalidraw.com/

Monodraw is also good for UI design. The minimal-looking rendering of the interface gets right to the core of how the thing is supposed to work.

Really it’s just the spreadsheet method taken to its logical end.

Irrelevant but spreadsheets have always struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces of software that we use. Automatically updating calculations, programming logic complex anough for most ERPs, using it is a database, easy organisation of data, graphs -- it has it all. From both a user and developer perspective, they are one of the most diverse tools on a computer. MS may make terrible software sometimes, but damn it, does Excel run the world.

For me a much better approach for working on wireframes, which I'd say this post is about, is Figma or Penpot.

Very neat article. Always interesting to see how people use spreadsheets.

Java called. Wants its GridBagLayout back. It says it might be patented and can probably litigate.

A big problem with modern interfaces is that they are too dynamic, with widgets appearing and disappearing or changing size, etc. Compare that with the old DOS console or Windows 9x (and later too) where the layout was fixed and inactive widgets were grayed out. There's an increased cognitive load from having to find where the information is displayed. On mobile I often press the wrong button because the UI decided in a split second to change the number of buttons in a row and move what's below my finger.

A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.

Modern UI design is such a colossal nightmare of inconsistent command lists, hidden menus, changing interface behavior, duplicative functionality... My understanding is that many developers now engage in "telemetry-based design" that work to redesign interfaces around user behavior, leading to such excellent decisions as

- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"

- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen

- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on

And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.

Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.

I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?

Delightful! I will have to send this to my friends who are spreadsheet-heads (affectionate)