This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus. If I'm viewing the menu of a restaurant on my phone, I always look in Google Maps for someone who took a picture of the menu, because it's a dense UI. Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once, so it takes many pages of scrolling to see everything.
Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once
This is due to accessibility regulations. Apple design guidelines and Material guidelines explicitly state how small font can and should be. Ask any designer you know.
Even brand new restaurants do this, and it's maddening. I also go straight to Google Maps for the menu. The best restaurant websites have the straight PDF of their menu, and automatically visible from the landing page of the site. Don't make me interact with a burger menu and then several clicks later finally get the menu, grr.
A PDF isn’t a great UX when viewed on a mobile screen. You’re going to be tapping and pinching and zooming to see different parts of the menu, and probably switching tabs back and forth to actually place the order.
There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. Nice clear typography, easily scroll through items by category, one tap to add to order or to get more details (and often photos) of the dish.
It’s just not an art that every restaurant (and restaurant software vendor) seems to have mastered yet, unfortunately.
> This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus.
It also explains why trading UI for pros haven't changed at all compared to these Bloomberg Terminal screenshots.
Sometimes a dense UI is precisely what you need. And the one thing that matters for people trading "manually", clicking on things, is latency: there should be no room for "wait, did the server get my order or not!?".
In a way TFA explains why a restaurant isn't a trading floor.
Dense and functional looking UIs are also prime for any sort of B2B software. It facilitates giving buyers the impression that the software is more functional than something super polished.
I think you're missing an important demographic, people with even minor motoric or visual impairments, who'd face great friction when accessing information, if it weren't for technologies that let us adapt UIs to various physical circumstances of their usage.
A phone screen becomes a well sized and flexible canvas, given sufficient dexterity and eye sight.
It can easily be a comparatively tiny medium as well.
Even if you have the full menu on your phone, you still have to zoom into the menu to read it and pan the view. I don't see how that's any different from scrolling through a categorized menu in a website on your phone.
The difference for me is when the menu gets large then it becomes laborious to scroll through a long linear menu vs a rectangular representation of that same data - which allows for much shorter scrolls. Imagine the menu on a restaurant was handed to you on a 4ft long receipt, you’d get pretty fed up of moving it up and down.
Zooming allows you to narrow in on the content you desire from a big picture point of view while vertically scrolling you just must hope that you get lucky to find what you are looking for.
For bonus points, some menu web sites also do that on their desktop web sites. I have seen many of them that show like 10 items on a 27″ 1440p desktop monitor.
Dining with a group where only one person speaks the local language fluently dials this up to 11. Lots of that pain will now start already while trying to figure out what everyone wants. Scrolling back and forth to help translate.
Yes. Mobile friendly sites tend to suck because they take us back to WAP and the 90:ies. Even desktop sites suffer from a weird movement recently where all text is unbearably HUGE.
One reason I personally prefer proper, physical menus is because they are always physically bigger than my phone or the tableside tablet if a restaurant uses those.
Why the sincere fuck must I peck around on a screen for ants when I am paying money to be served?
They contort themselves to redefine the word density, when what they should have said is that a good interface for humans maximizes information without losing visual salience (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_salience). That is, local density BUT ALSO clear-to-the-human-eye boundaries between information sets.
See the famous (still? hopefully?) Kadir&Brady paper "Saliency, Scale and Image Description" from 2000 for an explanation of how encapsulating information in something visibly distinct, like whitespace, increases the visual saliency of that information: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~timork/Saliency/ijcv_SalScale.p...
And even then it's user/domain specific. What is salient for a user who's an occasional user of your software vs someone who uses your software professionally every day is very different. You stop having to tune for a visual language that's universal-ish and instead have the ability to build-out a denser set of metaphors.
The "design needs to be understandable by the person writing the check who will never use it" problem is all over enterprise sales leading to software that doesn't need to look like $trendy_consumer_app but has to anyway to get the sale.
This seems to be begging for a user-switchable "dense mode" (like the fad of "dark mode" switches), which swaps the "buyer-oriented" CSS to the "I-use-this-every-day" oriented CSS.
Frames are out, whitespace is in. I wonder if the 30-year fashion cycle applies and it will be cool/retro to have compact, discoverable UIs in the 2030s.
> They contort themselves to redefine the word density,
Not once does the term "word density" occur. They talk about Tufte's concept of "information density," though. Edward Tufte is really must-read for any designer or anyone working with them.
> what they should have said is that a good interface for humans maximizes information without losing visual salience
And Tufte talks about that, too. I'm sure the author realized this.
The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?
It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps. Or take Hulu on my Roku, it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis, surrounded by tons of space, and make you expand it, via multiple button presses on the remote.
I once implemented a file list view for a start-up I was working for, off of a mock from the designer, similar to what you see when you are browsing Google Drive or Dropbox in a web browser, but with only one view, a list view with very large icons. The amount of whitespace was massive; use of screen real estate extremely poor. But then, these web UIs never look like the Finder, or Outlook, do they? They could. They could feel almost as snappy, too, with some allowance for network roundtrips. The Finder is actually pretty slow these days, even on a high-end MacBook browsing local files. There are lots of pauses and stutters.
There’s an unspoken rule against labeling things, too, if you can use a row of inscrutable icons instead.
There will always be designers experimenting with taking things away. Apple has done it plenty. What if there were no scrollbars, no ports, no home button or menu bar (just swipe from the edge of the screen), no keyboard, no headphone jack. Sometimes it’s a bold direction, occasionally a clear net negative. But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Often, design “trends” are just trends, in my (admittedly cynical) view; there isn’t necessarily any merit at the core, or the people propagating them seem more interested in conforming to trends than asking what is good. The dynamics of fashion are easy to underestimate as an engineer.
People love to copy things. People who grow up watching action movies and become action movie directors just want to make an action movie with all the action movie tropes. That’s the main thing, not necessarily picking the things that work well in action movies and bringing in some things that just work well, period, that are original or timeless, like good directors or writers do.
Besides people loving to copy, people sometimes think following trends is why something will sell. If you’re making clothing and you aren’t hip to this year’s styles and colors, no one is going to buy your stuff, is the sentiment I presume. It can easily become overwhelmingly about conforming to trends. Designers also tend to put famous people and sources of influence on pedestals and think they will never be 1/10 of the genius of, say, the person who decided that some famous building should look like a pile of mashed potatoes, or that an Apple billboard should just be black text centered on a plain white background. In art, as in philosophy, there is so much pressure to agree that certain people are good, regardless of any objectivity or lay opinions—so much focus on status—that to even think of what you are doing as potentially-good-in-others’-eyes, you need to copy someone or some brand with high status, or somehow attain your own status, is how I think people sometimes feel.
In other words, designers of UIs might falsely think the customer cares about trends and fads, and that their work will be evaluated through a system of reference points and status divorced from actual merit, as can happen in the design world and adjacent spheres (art, fashion, etc).
> The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?
It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.
> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...
At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.
You're describing cargo-cult. The mindless replication of form without consideration for function.
> But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Some people's view of minimalism is frugality for its own sake. It becomes an ideology that has nothing to do with the practical purposes behind the label, "doing away with excess". Excess is whatever is too much, redundant. The quality of something excessive is that you don't notice it when it's gone. You don't miss it. Minimalism is not about replacing a function with another noticeably more convoluted approach. My personal summary of being a minimalist is that you own all of what you need and you use all of what you own. A minimalist may decide that they don't own a fork because they can eat just as well with their spoon. If they can go months without noticing, it's a good call. The moment you see them contorting that spoon while attempting to cut their steak, they've lost the plot. Likewise in UI, the hard to find scroll bars, the greying of texts, the missing buttons are all being noticed by users. It's minimalism gone to seed.
In this horticultural metaphor, I sure hope we'll come to germinate a new and healthy UX maximalism, but so far, with rare exceptions few and far between, I'm not seeing it.
Even Wikipedia, long a bastion of the good old ugly, went ahead and introduced a hamburger menu, replaced the old global sidebar with the article's TOC (collapsed by default with "generous" spacing), and replaced the old right-hand TOC with...whitespace.
I assume you mean the "colored text might be a button to perform an action" thing, not drawing button frames on things like dialog box choices anymore?
I sometimes wonder if that is nothing but a cargo cult started by the dark pattern of wanting to minimize number of people clicking the "Deny" button.
> it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis
That's a good example of something I was thinking of which is cutting off text horizontally as well. Names of songs, artists, and albums in music apps is a common one, or titles in video apps. A lot of times the relevant piece of data (e.g. "part 5") is in the cut off part of the title. It's everywhere. Things should just flow to show all the information according to how much space is needed, just like how this comment is displayed on HN.
First, whitespace makes things look _expensive_, more luxurious (look at all that material we surround our content with). This comes from print, and as screens have gotten bigger (and resolutions have gotten finer) this trend has entered screen design too.
Second is the perennial "grandma argument" - i.e. if your website or software or whatnot is not built in such a way that "a grandma could figure it out" it gets proclaimed "high barrier" and folks say that "nobody will ever take time to learn how this works". This often results in bikeshedding over features which are absolutely clear to anyone who has ever used a computer, are useful - but if the product design is ruled by a person driven purely by aesthetics - the features get killed. The issue though is that most software is useful exactly because it does not place a single button called "Do Thing Nao" in the middle of the screen, but actually tries to be a tool.
Honestly it just boils down to one overhyped method of web design: MOBILE FIRST.
Mobile-first designs create gargantuan gaps of information sparseness on any larger form-factor.
Folks should go back and re-read ethan marcotte‘a Responsive Web Design. He goes from actually a desktop design and shrinks it down. No mention of mobile-first.
So, start with a design, and consider how it works on both form factors EQUALLY. None of this mobile-first crap unless building an app, a whole app, and nothing but a mobile app.
I suspect several of your examples are very likely the result of I18N considerations. Some alphabets/ideographic languages are denser than others. So text areas are set for the compact-est common denominator, and icons are unlabeled for similar reasons.
I really like the distinction of "density in time".
JIRA is a really visually dense application, but it's speed, as well as the number of different screens you normally need to click on makes it feel really sparse despite the dense visuals.
It's not just performance, it's also that the number of clicks to perform common actions is way too high because of feature bloat, extreme levels of customizability, and just plain bad design.
No. Performance is a feature[0]. It's neither good or bad, it's often a desirable feature but it doesn't mean it's bad. A green screen UI will kick the shit out of any modern day web UI (compare old school Infor with a modern SFDC interface). However, it's just another feature, like the ability to create tabs on the UI or use a cursor to move across the screen (vs a keyboard) that contributes to the overall UX.
The places where Jira is dense it is extremely cluttered and difficult to parse. And then places where I’d like Jira to be dense, it’s inexplicably not.
I’m looking at a Kanban board right now. I have a 41 inch display and I can see a total of 9 issues at a time across three columns. And that’s with basically doing everything I can to maximize the space for the board and minimize how much chrome goes around it. I have no idea how anyone uses this thing on a laptop display. It’s awful.
Differance - the difference that makes a difference.
It's not just more, or density: you need to sum the cost of context switches, which depends on context size and continuity with prior, i.e., delta size, which in turn depends in part on relevance i.e., which parts really matter.
Design by committee (including one person over time) loses the natural continuity and integrity of an initial idea.
Yeah JIRA doesn’t appear to cache any of its information and doesn’t appear to make it’s information cache-friendly for a browser, so you end up accidentally clicking on another issue and then having to click back costing you 30 seconds (on work network).
This is true, which is why people need to stop trying to make one UI that can cover both form factors. The two things are very different and require different designs.
> Things which are massively useful on desktop - like searching in a page or visually scanning a large doc are much harder on mobile
Interesting, am I the only one who almost always uses "search on page" and glimpses/scrolls over the entire page before reading both on mobile and desktop? Especially if I just came from a search engine, I search for the "highlighted" phrase.
> Peoples fingers are relatively fat and inaccurate.
They're accurate enough to tap on a single OSK key and get it right most of the time. Regardless, tap targets are only a very limited factor in UX design, so there should be plenty of scope for enhancing information density after accounting for that.
It's important to note though that the _actual_ touch targets for keys are influenced by what you've already written. You can miss the key from a visual perspective but still end up with the right letter as a result.
There's more to onscreen keyboards than you think. At least on Apple's side, they don't just check which key you've tapped, they also check where your finger is on the key relative to its neighbors. If you want to hit a d but hit an f by accident, the keyboard remembers that the tap was pretty ambiguous and you might actually have wanted a d instead. This information helps it choose the right autocorrect candidate. If you only register which key was tapped, but not where, typing accuracy goes down considerably.
All of this was described in detail in Ken Kocienda's book about his time at Apple working on the keyboard for the original iPhone.
Where are you getting this idea that tap targets are a very limited factor in UX design? My guess is: not from the interface guidelines for any mobile platform, and not from anyone who designs apps.
Dense UIs certainly have a place. But, simple UIs are not a fad, as it seems some people in this thread see it. The goal is as simple as possible, but no simpler.
The majority of applications and websites you interact with should be simple, and a few should be complex and dense. The reason is that you aren't an expert at most applications and websites, and you want them to be simple, so you can do the thing you want to do without investing much effort. But for applications you know really well, and use all the time, you want them to be more dense, so you can get more things done with fewer steps.
Because there is no easy, cost-effective, or even feasible way to scale the same application's UI complexity smoothly from newbie to expert, the designer almost always has to try to thread a path between the two extremes. This path has to make sense for the use cases they know about, and the largest share of the users they want to serve. This is extremely hard, not extremely simple, as it may seem from an observer's position.
I think you are correlating "simple" and "sparse". Sparse looks simple but in practice might be harder to use. Mobile restaurant menus, as discussed here a lot, are an example where this doesn't align. In general having to scroll a lot when I could see all information needed at once makes things harder, not simpler.
Our "oldschool" Windows B2B application is quite UI dense. Without looking overly busy, we've got information that can be viewed at a glance that other web-based systems use 6+ pages to contain.
I've seen users struggle to flip between many views in some SPA to figure out if things are right or not in their other system, then come to our system to correlate and looking at one or two windows they see all the same data.
I guess it's just the designers, though it seems CSS and HTML lends itself very well to information-sparse pages.
As we're transitioning to the web, due to customer demand, this is one aspect which I very strongly want to keep. We'll see how it goes.
I think it is the difference between being intended for a professional or consumer audience.
The professional tool is expected to be used for many hours over and over. The ideal design is whatever reduces the cycle load for the user. So you get information dense screens with all the tools up front and exposed. They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
The consumer tool is intended to be used rarely at great intervals. The ideal design is that which gently guides the user through an unfamiliar task. so you end up with deep sparse screens. Much easier to find your way but a pain in the ass when you know what you are doing.
I think a lot of designers over emphasize the experience for new users to the detriment of experienced users. To the point that I use "user-friendly" as a sort of euphemism for shitty software design. remember, usable is not the same thing as user friendly.
> They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
There are a lot of fields and buttons, but also a lot of "smart" logic that's part of our secret sauce that puts us ahead of most competitors.
I've been pondering if this is an area where we could use a LLM to improve the user experience. Have a way for the user to describe what they want to do, and have the LLM provide the steps necessary to do so.
When new it can be hard to read and understand large user manuals, especially when you're on the clock and need to have this order registered and processed yesterday. A lot of our users are not very technical either, so being able to clarify etc could be helpful.
A lot of the professional tools also have the luxury of not needing to be user friendly. Private individuals will just turn away from tools they don't know how to use, corporate employees just straight up don't have that option.
You can be every bit as dense in a web based application... you can make it look the same pixel perfect if you want to go that far.
I've never been a fan over overly dense applications, unless they are purpose built tools. There's a big difference between PhotoShop and Grubhub. Likewise there should be differences depending on display size and UX... If you're going to have users with finger/touch input, then you don't want things too close.. if it's mostly Desktop/Laptop, you can go much more dense with less issues.
Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
> There's a big difference between PhotoShop and Grubhub.
Others in this thread have already pointed out the massive difference in information density of a printed menu over most menus rendered on a mobile device.
> I've never been a fan over overly dense applications, unless they are purpose built tools.
Thing is it doesn't look super-dense. It's just space efficient let's say. Our UI components, based on Win32, makes it quite easy to have relatively dense UIs that's don't look cluttered or busy.
Like I said I'm sure you can do it using HTML and CSS, it just seems not to be done often.
That said it's absolutely a specialized application. At least 99% of our windows/views would make zero sense on a mobile or tablet.
> Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
Yeah we had to manually implement font scaling, before Microsoft added it to Windows. Certainly something we will support going to the web.
Keep in mind if you're selling to new customers, they may find your web app "dated". The new customers likely won't compare the web app to your desktop app, but to other competitors web apps. And these days the expectation for better or worse is that web apps look and feel a certain way (favor whitespace). I'm sure a dense UI can still look clean and modern, but it will take more effort.
We actually got some ex-graphic designers on our team now, so at least there won't be any more "programmer art" icons and such.
Fortunately our customers are mostly interested in functionality, and there's not a ton of competition. But yeah, a good looking interface does have a distinct impact so it will be something we'll have to balance.
This trend seems to be a western trend. Here is somewhere where I think we could learn from the apps in Japan and especially China.
I frequently feel for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber
As someone who reads Japanese passably well and uses a handful of Japanese apps and websites, I don't actually agree with this. Japanese apps certainly look more crowded than western ones, but it's mostly with irrelevant garbage, I don't think the density of useful info is actually all that much higher.
> for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber
The problem is that the era of zero interest rates and (mostly unprofitable) advertising-based business models means the tech industry shifted from making tools to benefit the user to "tools" that waste the user's time. Company targets are often measured in "engagement" such as screen time, DAU/MAU or pointless metrics about how many times some button was clicked.
The zero interest rate era is mostly behind us, but the mentality remains and company targets are still often based on that, so employees are not incentivized to make products more efficient for the user since doing so will reduce the DAU/MAU or whatever metric they're judged on.
Please don’t. Most mobile apps made by Chinese developers, esp. big techs, do employ grid, paged layouts everywhere as though multiple iOS home screens were squeezed into the app. However, most grids in such layouts are useless, distracting, and even malicious from a UX perspective, their mere reason to exist being to steer users into endless rabbit holes of the devs’ multiple lines of businesses for KPI purposes, and thus subject to constant and arbitrary changes. As such, you can find an icon for personal financing in a cloud storage app, or find an icon for groceries in a ride hailing app, only to be replaced with icons for online dating and hotel booking and something something a week later. This density of user-adversarial features is to be avoid by all means.
Readit News
There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. Nice clear typography, easily scroll through items by category, one tap to add to order or to get more details (and often photos) of the dish.
It’s just not an art that every restaurant (and restaurant software vendor) seems to have mastered yet, unfortunately.
It also explains why trading UI for pros haven't changed at all compared to these Bloomberg Terminal screenshots.
Sometimes a dense UI is precisely what you need. And the one thing that matters for people trading "manually", clicking on things, is latency: there should be no room for "wait, did the server get my order or not!?".
In a way TFA explains why a restaurant isn't a trading floor.
A phone screen becomes a well sized and flexible canvas, given sufficient dexterity and eye sight.
It can easily be a comparatively tiny medium as well.
doing that with a digital menu is maddening. "where's X?" "below Y, no you've scrolled too far", ad nauseam.
Why the sincere fuck must I peck around on a screen for ants when I am paying money to be served?
See the famous (still? hopefully?) Kadir&Brady paper "Saliency, Scale and Image Description" from 2000 for an explanation of how encapsulating information in something visibly distinct, like whitespace, increases the visual saliency of that information: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~timork/Saliency/ijcv_SalScale.p...
The "design needs to be understandable by the person writing the check who will never use it" problem is all over enterprise sales leading to software that doesn't need to look like $trendy_consumer_app but has to anyway to get the sale.
Not once does the term "word density" occur. They talk about Tufte's concept of "information density," though. Edward Tufte is really must-read for any designer or anyone working with them.
> what they should have said is that a good interface for humans maximizes information without losing visual salience
And Tufte talks about that, too. I'm sure the author realized this.
It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps. Or take Hulu on my Roku, it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis, surrounded by tons of space, and make you expand it, via multiple button presses on the remote.
I once implemented a file list view for a start-up I was working for, off of a mock from the designer, similar to what you see when you are browsing Google Drive or Dropbox in a web browser, but with only one view, a list view with very large icons. The amount of whitespace was massive; use of screen real estate extremely poor. But then, these web UIs never look like the Finder, or Outlook, do they? They could. They could feel almost as snappy, too, with some allowance for network roundtrips. The Finder is actually pretty slow these days, even on a high-end MacBook browsing local files. There are lots of pauses and stutters.
There’s an unspoken rule against labeling things, too, if you can use a row of inscrutable icons instead.
There will always be designers experimenting with taking things away. Apple has done it plenty. What if there were no scrollbars, no ports, no home button or menu bar (just swipe from the edge of the screen), no keyboard, no headphone jack. Sometimes it’s a bold direction, occasionally a clear net negative. But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Often, design “trends” are just trends, in my (admittedly cynical) view; there isn’t necessarily any merit at the core, or the people propagating them seem more interested in conforming to trends than asking what is good. The dynamics of fashion are easy to underestimate as an engineer.
People love to copy things. People who grow up watching action movies and become action movie directors just want to make an action movie with all the action movie tropes. That’s the main thing, not necessarily picking the things that work well in action movies and bringing in some things that just work well, period, that are original or timeless, like good directors or writers do.
Besides people loving to copy, people sometimes think following trends is why something will sell. If you’re making clothing and you aren’t hip to this year’s styles and colors, no one is going to buy your stuff, is the sentiment I presume. It can easily become overwhelmingly about conforming to trends. Designers also tend to put famous people and sources of influence on pedestals and think they will never be 1/10 of the genius of, say, the person who decided that some famous building should look like a pile of mashed potatoes, or that an Apple billboard should just be black text centered on a plain white background. In art, as in philosophy, there is so much pressure to agree that certain people are good, regardless of any objectivity or lay opinions—so much focus on status—that to even think of what you are doing as potentially-good-in-others’-eyes, you need to copy someone or some brand with high status, or somehow attain your own status, is how I think people sometimes feel.
In other words, designers of UIs might falsely think the customer cares about trends and fads, and that their work will be evaluated through a system of reference points and status divorced from actual merit, as can happen in the design world and adjacent spheres (art, fashion, etc).
It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.
> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...
At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.
> But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Some people's view of minimalism is frugality for its own sake. It becomes an ideology that has nothing to do with the practical purposes behind the label, "doing away with excess". Excess is whatever is too much, redundant. The quality of something excessive is that you don't notice it when it's gone. You don't miss it. Minimalism is not about replacing a function with another noticeably more convoluted approach. My personal summary of being a minimalist is that you own all of what you need and you use all of what you own. A minimalist may decide that they don't own a fork because they can eat just as well with their spoon. If they can go months without noticing, it's a good call. The moment you see them contorting that spoon while attempting to cut their steak, they've lost the plot. Likewise in UI, the hard to find scroll bars, the greying of texts, the missing buttons are all being noticed by users. It's minimalism gone to seed.
That's a fine way to frame it.
In this horticultural metaphor, I sure hope we'll come to germinate a new and healthy UX maximalism, but so far, with rare exceptions few and far between, I'm not seeing it.
Even Wikipedia, long a bastion of the good old ugly, went ahead and introduced a hamburger menu, replaced the old global sidebar with the article's TOC (collapsed by default with "generous" spacing), and replaced the old right-hand TOC with...whitespace.
I assume you mean the "colored text might be a button to perform an action" thing, not drawing button frames on things like dialog box choices anymore?
I sometimes wonder if that is nothing but a cargo cult started by the dark pattern of wanting to minimize number of people clicking the "Deny" button.
This era of UI as fashion sucks.
That's a good example of something I was thinking of which is cutting off text horizontally as well. Names of songs, artists, and albums in music apps is a common one, or titles in video apps. A lot of times the relevant piece of data (e.g. "part 5") is in the cut off part of the title. It's everywhere. Things should just flow to show all the information according to how much space is needed, just like how this comment is displayed on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198893 (May 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17427354 (June 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673628 (June 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053634 (Feb 2015)
First, whitespace makes things look _expensive_, more luxurious (look at all that material we surround our content with). This comes from print, and as screens have gotten bigger (and resolutions have gotten finer) this trend has entered screen design too.
Second is the perennial "grandma argument" - i.e. if your website or software or whatnot is not built in such a way that "a grandma could figure it out" it gets proclaimed "high barrier" and folks say that "nobody will ever take time to learn how this works". This often results in bikeshedding over features which are absolutely clear to anyone who has ever used a computer, are useful - but if the product design is ruled by a person driven purely by aesthetics - the features get killed. The issue though is that most software is useful exactly because it does not place a single button called "Do Thing Nao" in the middle of the screen, but actually tries to be a tool.
Mobile-first designs create gargantuan gaps of information sparseness on any larger form-factor.
Folks should go back and re-read ethan marcotte‘a Responsive Web Design. He goes from actually a desktop design and shrinks it down. No mention of mobile-first.
So, start with a design, and consider how it works on both form factors EQUALLY. None of this mobile-first crap unless building an app, a whole app, and nothing but a mobile app.
Pixel perfect design is dead but still living a zombie life.
What concerns me about this massive whitespace trend is that it's been going on for at least 15 years. That's a really long trend.
"Mobile first"
p.s. oops, sorry, not the first comment of this kind. well, it's just obvious
JIRA is a really visually dense application, but it's speed, as well as the number of different screens you normally need to click on makes it feel really sparse despite the dense visuals.
[0] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/
I’m looking at a Kanban board right now. I have a 41 inch display and I can see a total of 9 issues at a time across three columns. And that’s with basically doing everything I can to maximize the space for the board and minimize how much chrome goes around it. I have no idea how anyone uses this thing on a laptop display. It’s awful.
Differance - the difference that makes a difference.
It's not just more, or density: you need to sum the cost of context switches, which depends on context size and continuity with prior, i.e., delta size, which in turn depends in part on relevance i.e., which parts really matter.
Design by committee (including one person over time) loses the natural continuity and integrity of an initial idea.
The first derivative of difference?
- Peoples fingers are relatively fat and inaccurate.
- They are slower that desktop - so you'd break the load into parts
- The vertical scroll form factor and screen size limits what you can do.
- Things which are massively useful on desktop - like searching in a page or visually scanning a large doc are much harder on mobile.
A succinct summary of my high school coach's review of me.
Interesting, am I the only one who almost always uses "search on page" and glimpses/scrolls over the entire page before reading both on mobile and desktop? Especially if I just came from a search engine, I search for the "highlighted" phrase.
They're accurate enough to tap on a single OSK key and get it right most of the time. Regardless, tap targets are only a very limited factor in UX design, so there should be plenty of scope for enhancing information density after accounting for that.
All of this was described in detail in Ken Kocienda's book about his time at Apple working on the keyboard for the original iPhone.
The majority of applications and websites you interact with should be simple, and a few should be complex and dense. The reason is that you aren't an expert at most applications and websites, and you want them to be simple, so you can do the thing you want to do without investing much effort. But for applications you know really well, and use all the time, you want them to be more dense, so you can get more things done with fewer steps.
Because there is no easy, cost-effective, or even feasible way to scale the same application's UI complexity smoothly from newbie to expert, the designer almost always has to try to thread a path between the two extremes. This path has to make sense for the use cases they know about, and the largest share of the users they want to serve. This is extremely hard, not extremely simple, as it may seem from an observer's position.
I've seen users struggle to flip between many views in some SPA to figure out if things are right or not in their other system, then come to our system to correlate and looking at one or two windows they see all the same data.
I guess it's just the designers, though it seems CSS and HTML lends itself very well to information-sparse pages.
As we're transitioning to the web, due to customer demand, this is one aspect which I very strongly want to keep. We'll see how it goes.
The professional tool is expected to be used for many hours over and over. The ideal design is whatever reduces the cycle load for the user. So you get information dense screens with all the tools up front and exposed. They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
The consumer tool is intended to be used rarely at great intervals. The ideal design is that which gently guides the user through an unfamiliar task. so you end up with deep sparse screens. Much easier to find your way but a pain in the ass when you know what you are doing.
I think a lot of designers over emphasize the experience for new users to the detriment of experienced users. To the point that I use "user-friendly" as a sort of euphemism for shitty software design. remember, usable is not the same thing as user friendly.
As a side note:
> They tend to be intimidating as hell for casual and new users.
There are a lot of fields and buttons, but also a lot of "smart" logic that's part of our secret sauce that puts us ahead of most competitors.
I've been pondering if this is an area where we could use a LLM to improve the user experience. Have a way for the user to describe what they want to do, and have the LLM provide the steps necessary to do so.
When new it can be hard to read and understand large user manuals, especially when you're on the clock and need to have this order registered and processed yesterday. A lot of our users are not very technical either, so being able to clarify etc could be helpful.
I've never been a fan over overly dense applications, unless they are purpose built tools. There's a big difference between PhotoShop and Grubhub. Likewise there should be differences depending on display size and UX... If you're going to have users with finger/touch input, then you don't want things too close.. if it's mostly Desktop/Laptop, you can go much more dense with less issues.
Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
Others in this thread have already pointed out the massive difference in information density of a printed menu over most menus rendered on a mobile device.
That reminds me of the widgets and named-frames of: https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/
Thing is it doesn't look super-dense. It's just space efficient let's say. Our UI components, based on Win32, makes it quite easy to have relatively dense UIs that's don't look cluttered or busy.
Like I said I'm sure you can do it using HTML and CSS, it just seems not to be done often.
That said it's absolutely a specialized application. At least 99% of our windows/views would make zero sense on a mobile or tablet.
> Do keep accessibility in mind, some of us zoom up a couple steps on many sites.
Yeah we had to manually implement font scaling, before Microsoft added it to Windows. Certainly something we will support going to the web.
Fortunately our customers are mostly interested in functionality, and there's not a ton of competition. But yeah, a good looking interface does have a distinct impact so it will be something we'll have to balance.
I frequently feel for any app that I use frequently, i would prefer for it to have many options that I could use to customize its behavior. For instance, Uber
In Chinese apps, I can post photos, message my friends, order food, call an uber, pay transactions, all from the same app
The problem is that the era of zero interest rates and (mostly unprofitable) advertising-based business models means the tech industry shifted from making tools to benefit the user to "tools" that waste the user's time. Company targets are often measured in "engagement" such as screen time, DAU/MAU or pointless metrics about how many times some button was clicked.
The zero interest rate era is mostly behind us, but the mentality remains and company targets are still often based on that, so employees are not incentivized to make products more efficient for the user since doing so will reduce the DAU/MAU or whatever metric they're judged on.
Please don’t. Most mobile apps made by Chinese developers, esp. big techs, do employ grid, paged layouts everywhere as though multiple iOS home screens were squeezed into the app. However, most grids in such layouts are useless, distracting, and even malicious from a UX perspective, their mere reason to exist being to steer users into endless rabbit holes of the devs’ multiple lines of businesses for KPI purposes, and thus subject to constant and arbitrary changes. As such, you can find an icon for personal financing in a cloud storage app, or find an icon for groceries in a ride hailing app, only to be replaced with icons for online dating and hotel booking and something something a week later. This density of user-adversarial features is to be avoid by all means.
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