Danielle Rosenthal

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.

LISTGRIDCHART

The same screens every morning#

Most people who use software for work open the same two or three screens every morning, in the same order.

For them, those screens are the product.

What information software is#

Software for tracking work, like inspections, cases or orders, is information software: people use it to look at what’s there, find patterns and decide what to act on. So the way the data is arranged on screen is the thing being used.

The interface designer Bret Victor put it in one sentence in 2006: the essence of information software is the presentation.

A view decides what people notice#

Trygve Reenskaug defined the model-view-controller pattern at Xerox PARC in 1979. In his memo, the view has the same standing as the data, and its job is to highlight some attributes and suppress others.

Ben Shneiderman’s 1996 rule for finding information follows the order a person moves through a product: overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand.

What the products that won all do#

Airtable shows the same table as several view types, and Notion lets different people see one database in different ways. Salesforce and Linear both build daily work around saved list views.

Why a saved view is stickier than a feature#

People value things more when they build them themselves. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely named this the IKEA effect, after flat-pack furniture, so a view someone configured feels like theirs.

That morning routine is a habit, and the few views in it are where design time pays off most.

What follows for shipping it#

So views ship already working. Every page opens on a default view, shared with everyone and built from what the customer already looks at.

  • A default view on every list page, filled in from what already exists
  • Columns that can show people’s answers, as well as fixed details
  • Filters that work on those answers too
  • Sharing by role or team, open to everyone by default
  • A page that’s useful before anyone configures anything

Back to the morning#

When every page opens on a working view from day one, those two or three screens are useful the first morning somebody opens them.

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