Practice / Information software
The view is the product
In software where people read, scan, compare and decide, the arrangement of the data is the product itself, and it repays the same care as the data model.
The claim#
Record-management software is information software. People aren’t authoring content in it. They’re looking at records, finding patterns, and deciding what to do. For that class of software the visible arrangement of the data is the thing being used.
Bret Victor put it in one sentence in 2006: the essence of information software is the presentation.
Forty-five years of the same conclusion#
Trygve Reenskaug’s 1979 memo at Xerox PARC, which defined how graphical applications have been built ever since, placed the view on architecturally co-equal footing with the data model. A view highlights certain attributes and suppresses others. Reenskaug gave it the same architectural standing as the model.
Database theory encoded the same idea. The three-schema architecture separates physical storage, logical schema, and the external schema, which is the user’s view. The external layer is first-class, not derivative: every user accesses the same data and has a different customized view of it.
Ben Shneiderman’s visual information-seeking mantra from 1996 reads as a description of the product flow: overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand. List view, filtered view, record. Card, Mackinlay and Shneiderman on visualization amplifying cognition; Bertin on which visual variables make which patterns perceptible; Tufte on small multiples. Each saved view is an act of externalized thinking.
Every category leader converged on it#
Airtable sells the same table as eight view types and describes the value as the same data empowering wildly different use cases. Sequoia described Notion’s innovation as letting people configure views of databases so different people could see the same information presented differently. Salesforce built its entire user experience around list views. Monday ships nineteen view types. Asana calls one project with four view types its strongest architectural decision.
Retool exists because someone noticed that every internal tool is a configured view over a database. When you strip away everything else, views are what remain.
Why a saved view is stickier than a feature#
People value things more when they build them themselves, which is the effect Norton, Mochon and Ariely named after flat-pack furniture. A view someone configured is theirs in a way a feature never is.
It’s also a habit cue. The same two or three views, opened in the same order, every morning. Alan Cooper’s perpetual intermediate lives in a small number of views daily, which is where design investment should go.
What follows for shipping it#
If the view is the product then a view capability can’t ship as an empty configuration screen. Every page needs a working default view on day one, distributed to everyone, built from what the customer is already looking at.
- A system default view on every list page, populated from existing state
- Columns drawn from response data as well as static fields
- Filters that reach into the same response data
- Sharing by role or team, inclusive by default
- Nothing that requires configuration before the page is useful