I discussed the whitespace issue with a Google engineer some years back, when Material UI was the hot new thing and lowering UI density became trendy.
He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
> He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people,
Ah, this is the phrase I see most often when one UX person or team wants to justify throwing out the previous UX person or team's design in order to replace it with their own.
On top of that, it is of course very condescending to the users. Especially those who have invested significant amounts of their own time in leaning how to effectively use the existing UI.
Additionally, doesn't changing UIs every few years mess with older and less tech literate users? They have to relearn how to use software they've used for years
Yes it does. I was particularly struck by that some years ago durig the digital TV switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine had been using a TV with a simple one-to-one mapping between the numbered buttons on the remote and the channel which would be shown on-screen. He could manage this despite not having much sensation in his fingers, and poor eyesight.
Now he suddenly had to contend with two remotes, and in order to use the set-top box he would have had to build a mental model of how the on-screen EPG worked, develop some sense of current "location" within the menu, and get to grips with selecting an option - all stuff the rest of us take for granted without a second thought. But because of his failing eyesight, his failing sense of touch in his fingers, and an inability (and yes, a non-trivial amount of unwillingness!) to learn new interface concepts, it was basically the end of his unassisted access to TV.
This, 200%. I have the same problem with my 87yo father, and no idea how to fix it. I've drawn up step by step instructions, labelled both the TV and set top box remotes and devices with icons, yet somehow he manages to press something on either that throws the whole system out of whack and results in a phone call about "the TV not working". Usually unsolvable without being there in person, which with Dad living 250km away is not doable on a daily basis.
We bought a kid's universal remote from Argos, with big colourful buttons, then I put together an Arduino-based gizmo which received button presses from the new remote, and played macros of button presses to the TV and set top box. It worked up to a point, but of course it's defeated by any buttons whose meanings are affected by state - the button which toggled between the TV's internal tuner and the AV input was a particular problem.
This is what gets housesitters fired. Unfortunately we can't fire UX designers, only complain and maybe switch to another tool. The worst is when we selected a tool specifically for its UX and they eventually replace it with a different one we don't like and we wouldn't have selected that tool if it had that UX to start with (cough, K-9, cough.)
Anyway, I'm sticking to K-9 5.600 with the original UX because the new one is very wrong for my use case: 3 separate accounts that must stay separate and a quick way to move between them. Given the comments on Google Play [1] and the old discussion on K-9 forums I know that I'm not alone.
I backed up the APK and sideload it on any new device I get, or after a full reset.
2003 maybe, but genuine advancements have been made since then that you probably want. Good luck trying to use the 2016 version of Figma/GDocs/[insert SaaS here] or even desktop software like Adobe CC or MS Office!
> Ah, this is the phrase I see most often when one UX person or team wants to justify throwing out the previous UX person or team's design in order to replace it with their own
And the funny thing is that this process never ends. Every couple of months the UI must be redesigned. They can never settle on one idea.
This happens because every 2 years (centered around promotional cycles) managerial types will demand a UX study where they ask participants something to the effect of, "On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate [product] on looking modern?" And anything less than a perfect 'modern' (an impossible goal) means the whole thing needs to adapt to whatever god awful design trend is going around.
Thats one difficulty in UI design. Very few people care if a program uses binary trees or hash tables underneath, but everyone and their mother in law have an opinion on the color of buttons and the radius of the corners.
I get that, but I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
And as I mentioned, the flat style hides discoverability, so I think it offsets the usability gains from making the UI appear less cluttered.
So sure, maybe extra real estate means we can allow UI elements to breathe a bit, but keep the 3D look on elements that can be interacted with. Buttons should still be buttons. Text should be text. Interactable buttons should not be merely an icon or text.
Right, I remember an Apple keynote back in the OS X 10.1 era where the presenters were proud of the drop shadows because they provided a sense of depth, contrast, and clarity. You never hear that kind of talk anymore.
Optimizing for new users over experienced users in productivity UX design is a big pet peeve for me.
You're building software for people to use 5 days a week for their job, make it as easy to use as possible assuming they've spent some time learning how to use it. Don't sacrifice that to optimize for the tiny fraction of time where they're beginners.
See also: basing your entire design on usability testing performed with people who are using it for the first time.
It's obvious why they would do this though. They already have your money. You're already locked in. Why would they design the UI for you?
They are looking at people who aren't veteran users of the product because those are the ones who will buy it. If someone new to the product can't understand it quickly, they won't buy.
Does it suck yes but it's very logical.
I gave up on GUIs years ago and just do as much as I can via the terminal. The terminal is the ultimate power user experience.
Sharepoint is killing Excel since you cannot link spreadsheets anymore.
The shared spreadsheet model is killing productivity.
Same for Windows not allowing to sort programs in taskbar the way they were opened. Tons of office workers have multiple documents opened and dont even know how to try to unfuck their taskabar (that is still bad in Windows 10/11).
The UI is designed for potential new customers that might give them money, not existing customers that are already giving them money and will continue to give them money no matter what they do.
If you're dealing with a hundred people in an office, then the vast majority can probably deal with a high-density UI. Because they are there for work and the UI - and more importantly the concepts underneath that UI and the mental model it requires - will be related to the stuff they already know.
But if you're dealing with an audience of millions who are trying to pass the time, or using apps or parts of the system that they rarely interact with, or have no real interest in the device, then a high-density UI will be extremely intimidating. They have no mental model of what is being represented on-screen - and if it's casual usage, they have no desire to spend the energy to learn that mental model. What they will want is the device to have two big buttons saying "do this" or "do that". Which is why the iPhone's grid of icons endures - "I want a bus ticket", "I want the camera", "I want to watch a video".
Personally I think the hardest part of UX design is ensuring the model presented on-screen matches the model that the user is expecting.
Which has two implications - firstly, it's entirely audience dependent and secondly, the further the UX model and the actual underlying model diverge, the more cracks will appear while people are using it - so you have to design from the bottom up for that given audience.
If typing weren't such an important part of my job, I probably would too. There have been times when I've not been writing much code and then I rarely touched a computer. For calls, meetings, sketches, quick note taking, planning stuff out, audio editing, things like that I much prefer an iPad.
Can't we design two interfaces - one advanced (a dense grid of icons), and the other for users who want it simple - just numbers and two buttons to call and to hang up?
> more importantly the concepts underneath that UI and the mental model it requires - will be related to the stuff they already know.
And, perhaps most importantly - if they don't learn, they can be removed. Big difference between UI for work, and UI for fun. You can design differently for a captive audience. This can be used for both good and evil (also see: Government websites).
> Not buying it. Most people can deal just fine with spreadsheets, which are the epitome of high density UI.
I bet you're thinking about people who have used spreadsheets before. You might even be thinking of people who use spreadsheets weekly or daily. Try putting them in front of a new user, and you will be shocked.
As someone who has performed many usability tests, I can only think of one person who said "I wish this was more dense and complicated", and that fellow sticks out because he is the exception who proves the rule that almost everyone wants it to be simple and above all clear. Most of the time, people just want to know what they should be doing next, and everything else is a potential source of confusion.
As someone who works side-by-side with creatives, I think you're being generous with "people can deal just fine with spreadsheets". I've seen multiple creative directors responsible for million-dollar-ad campaigns have to be walked through a simple spreadsheet.
> He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
I think part of the problem here is that "high-density UIs" gets used in multiple ways. Some designers, perhaps not those with ready access to users, take high-density UIs to refer to the markings on the screen. A button with borders next to a text field with borders is considered to be higher density than a button without borders next to a text field without borders, because the borders visually divide the field up. And if the border lines provide an affordance (e.g. a button pushed up), then that's complexity (because the lines have different colors, which is more complex than a design where lines all have the same color).
But such an interpretation goes against the research of the 80s and 90s. I have never been directed to evidence that "complexity" and "density" refer specifically to visual complexity and visual density as distinct from conceptual complexity and conceptual density or widget complexity and widget density - all the evidence I've ever come across (as in the old evidence, or the medium post by another descendant comment of my parent comment) suggests that visual complexity and density actually operate to clarify conceptual/widget complexity/density.
So I think the claims made by practitioners need to inspected and made more precise. What kind of complexity and density are they trying to resolve? And what evidence do they have that this specific kind of complexity and density is problematic, rather than clarifying?
This is so true. I love going on an internet journey and ending up on some present-day Japanese website that looks like it was created in 1997. The modern UI/UX cancer hasn't metastasized over there yet.
I'm a native speaker and I find those dense website hard to read. Harder than English (my second language) ones.
I think it's a "grass is greener" case. I appreciate the trend of adding extra padding around the English internet a lot. If they're designed like their Chinese counterparts they'll be barely readable for me.
> He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
Meanwhile every day I see people struggle to work with the more minimalist UI designs we see today. A lot of options are obfuscated and hidden away under the guise of keeping it clean, when instead the focus ought to be on laying out tools in a way that makes sense and remains in people's memory.
And of course every bit of software has different ideas about what minimalist and clean is, so you have to remember multiple ways how to do the same tasks.
I think this is true, if we also allow that people who have been using the UI for a while also aren't confused and overwhelmed by it.
So the whole UI is being optimised for non-technical new users. Which does make sense commercially - you don't want your product reviews all about how the UI is too complex. But it would be nice to be able to flip a switch and tell the thing "I know what I'm doing now, can I have my pixels back please?"
Was that an opinion based upon design trends or actual research and studies? And I wonder if any such research ruled out bias that "old" was hard to use and "modern" is easy to use.
But then you look at Japanese (and other far east) websites and they're full of info, buttons, links, etc. Like old western websites!
I've always wondered why we diverged so much on UIs between eastern and western countries. Chinese characters pack information in a way that our alphabet doesn't, but that can't be the only reason, can it?
Years ago we were re-skinning a product to use Material UI. The launch coincided with a big public announcement. We joked that our VP was going to announce that he was giving everyone in attendance a 32-inch monitor to accommodate all the new whitespace (This was closer to the time when I/O was famous for giving out free stuff).
People also have different navigational patterns. Some will navigate to try to accomplish the task as quick as possible whereas others try to understand every option available to them (I.E. learn the tool holistically) before attempting the task they set out to do.
He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.