What are some examples of good administrative/management UI design to use for inspiration?
tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done?
I am currently developing a moderately complex web application with a management interface that will be used by non-technical users. It also has a separate interface for technicians to see their tasks and submit reports, but I'm pretty happy with how that's coming together. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to display data in terms of what kind of "widgets" I could use. For example, a calendar view with daily, weekly, and monthly view modes. What I'm looking for inspiration with are the finer details, like filtering data, navigation, data hierarchy. I want to find things I hadn't even considered and aren't part of the typical "flat web UI toolkit" playbook.
I'd love to steal small ideas from a forgotten tool built for Windows 95, or maybe those paradigms are best left in the past—I don't know. Personally, I find most flat UI applications are almost useless in terms of discoverability, productivity, and general ease of use. Something like the Azure dashboard is what I would like to avoid building.
I'm also trying to keep my front end stack pretty lean by using Vue.js and rolling my own components based on accessible and keyboard navigable HTML components.
This is kind of an outside-the-box suggestion, but have you considered drawing inspiration from Adobe's Creative Suite? Despite all the horrible decisions Adobe has made from a consumer friendliness perspective, Photoshop and Premiere in particular still have absolutely fantastic UIs in terms of "getting shit done", despite the complexity of the tasks they facilitate people performing, IMO. And them still being the defacto industry standard despite all their corporate shenanigans and poor business practices speaks to that, I suspect.
I like this suggestion quite a bit. Even though I use Illustrator and Photoshop nearly daily I hadn't really looked at them for inspiration.
What stands out to me with Adobe software is their mastery of hierarchy and context.
The toolbar buttons are the best example of grouping similar tools under a single compact dropdown menu button. If I want a "text-y" tool, I immediately know where to look for it. Great example of hierarchy.
The context part is how the overall interface changes when using different tools. Irrelevant information about typography, for example, disappears in the top toolbar when I'm using the Artboard tool.
Thanks for the suggestion, it made me think a bit!
The ability to quickly and easily customize their interfaces is also a huge reason I prefer them over their competitors too. The fact that I can choose to show or hide almost every window, move them around to wherever best suits my own workflow (even to other monitors), have them snap tightly into place next to each other (or even layer them into each other), and have everything independently collapse/expand with one click, makes a huge difference in terms of my productivity.
And NP, glad I could help. :)
Here's what I suggest: Don't spend your resources (time, money, effort) too aggressively in the early going, but instead just come up with a good-enough MVP, then get your end users involved in the development cycle early and often. Gather feedback from them while you iterate.
Prototyping tools (Sketch, Invision, Figma, etc.) may help save time and money while still allowing you to gain valuable insight into what your end users want, or what will or won't work for them in terms of UI and UX.
Windows 95 is one of the most polished, thought out, and thoroughly engineered UIs in history, so you are on point looking at it for ideas. So is Office 97.
With VirtualBox, you are only an hour or two away, at most, from being able to analyze it yourself, in detail, taking as much time as you want.
My only off the top of my head suggestion is if you have a large set of subjects and details that a user may need to drill down in to (which you can't predict meaning you need to slap the entire large selection in there) is miller columns for the drilling.
The benefits is that from a user perspective, with a large set of information it's one of the best solutions for digging in to the information for users with no clear idea of where to find it.