condensed UI for Applications view

[squalou]

I understand that the "Wallboard" view is meant to be a condensed view, and it's doing its job.

Nonetheless, the "Applications" view is such a desert of informations ! I mean, more than half of the screen is used by spacers, font is huge, and the enormous "all up" green tick is ... there, ok, but does it require to eat up so much space ?

To that regard I remember fondly of spring boot admin v1 listing.

I'm scrolling over 200 services and seriously, a more compact view would help anyone really trying to use this view.

We're living a time where display screens have never been bigger and cheap, and we're displaying fewer data on them than on old 13 inches CRT at the time :)

On top of that, ... in term of readability, names and versions are concatenated ? making the view a mess instead of having a nice 'table" aligned view in columns.

You will probably object "I can filter" ... yes and no, this all depends on services naming conventions that I'm free to choose.

[squalou]

to compare, on a basic full hd screen :

admin v1 : 11 rows of services with some details displayed.

admin now : 7 services with name and version only

[squalou]

for those not old enough, here's what it used to look like ... and now prove me the new view brings anything better.

[SteKoe]

Hi @squalou,

thanks for opening this issue about the lack of usability in "Applications" view and a thank you for using Spring Boot Admin in general. Allow me to respond to your text by quoting parts of your post:

Nonetheless, the "Applications" view is such a desert of informations ! I mean, more than half of the screen is used by spacers, font is huge, and the enormous "all up" green tick is ... there, ok, but does it require to eat up so much space ?

We are sorry, that you do not like this kind of representation or design at all. The last years have shown, that such a reduced and yet sufficient way of presenting information to customers have been accepted very well.

To that regard I remember fondly of spring boot admin v1 listing.

Well, since Spring Boot Admin v2 we have switched the Applications view to the one we have right now. Applications are aggregated as accorddion elements having the respective instances inside of it.

in term of readability, names and versions are concatenated ? making the view a mess instead of having a nice 'table" aligned view in columns.

I understand, that you prefer a view that contains of a plain table view listing all applications, right?

admin v1 : 11 rows of services with some details displayed.
admin now : 7 services with name and version only

That is, as far as I can reproduce, right and visible in the attached screenshot.

Let's get to the core questions of your posts, that have not been explicitly been namend but seem to exist:

• What kind of information are you missing?
• What exactly do you want so see on the Applications view and per Instance?
• Have you some clear "wishes" that we can elaborate and discuss in the SBA team?
• Have you some examples for a software that is, in your opinion, very good in presenting information in a way you prefer (excl. SBAv1)?

Regards,
Stephan

[squalou]

Hi and thank you for your answer.
Allow me to ask what you mean by "have been accepted very well" : does it it nobody complained, or does it mean people declared it was better ? I'm seriously curious - not only by this UI but generally speaking. I may be totally hermetic to these new design concepts that put spaces everywhere ... so I may be the issue. Or, I may be the only one who take time to report it. Who knows.

I may be the issue, since I've learned readability at the times of Latex documents, number of idioms per lines, space between lines. Then I learned UI principles dating back to the law of Fits. Yes, I'm getting old.

This being said, I would understand this "spacey" design to be fashionable on mobile devices where finger size matters ... and maybe it's easier to adopt a single design for all, and the mobile won. Maybe, but would that apply to a spring boot admin UI... not sure.

So, to the point with your questions :

• What kind of information are you missing?

I'm mostly missing density and readability of information.

For instance : Number of running instances used to be clear, now you have to focus on the name, and the info location depends on the name length.

And finally I miss the quick access to DETAILS of a running service. One have to guess what area must be clicked to access the info. Nothing identifies it as a button or a link or whatever. Once again call me old if you like, but for all design principles that's an error.

• What exactly do you want so see on the Applications view and per Instance?

Once again it's not so much missing info than readability AND a working partial filter.
In my organization for instance, services are named so that beginning of names are a kind of 'group' to which they belong.
I have no more than 10 services per group.
So, listing all services starting by the group name displays all the services, with all info, on one page, without doomscrolling.

name, version, number of UP, number of , identified quick access to details, all this aligned properly so that the eye knows where to look quickly.

• Have you some clear "wishes" that we can elaborate and discuss in the SBA team?

1. get rid of the overall "all up" thingie, or try to convince me it is useful in one real situation.
2. build a working filter on the UI
3. at least get rid of the pt-5 and pb-5 styling, see attached screenshot and be honest : it's not worst and bring more info ( = it's better imho)

• Have you some examples for a software that is, in your opinion, very good in presenting information in a way you prefer

That's a tricky one :) , there are so many.
Best examples that come to mind to sum things up are : Any file manager using its list view. (Dolphin, Nautilus, cosmic-files, midnight commander, thunar, windows file explorer ... even Amaze on Android ). Clear columns, resizable, can be sorted and filtered.

But I could also name any app using a grid view of sort, music playlists, whatever.

We're discussing here a very technical UI, I think, so bells whistles and fashionability is second to usability