This is a very tech-literate user opinion on this matter. Having lived together with a UI designer for over 5 years I have come to appreciate the art and scienc

This is a very tech-literate user opinion on this matter. Having lived together with a UI designer for over 5 years I have come to appreciate the art and science of UI design. Whereas before I would have had the same opinion, I can now better see a UI through the eyes of an end user, and the larger amount of white space is definitely an improvement. It's about allowing space for your eyes to rest, it's about providing clear compartments in the UI that pop out immediately, instead of a compressed mess where everything seems to blend together. Ideally you should know where to click seconds after deciding you want to do something, even as a new user. UI design is not just some designer deciding that something looks good and just doing it that way. UI/UX design is not some "beautiful interaction layer" that you put on top of the actual "real part" of the application. A lot of software developers (me included originally) seem to think that way, I don't know why, maybe it's a bias in education. UI design is an integral part of the software development process, and I would argue more important than the programming itself. In fact, it should be the primary source of decisions that we make in our choices behind the software development process, not the other way around. UI/UX design is the art and science of looking at your product the way a user would look at it, making it as accessible and intuitive as possible. It is the art and science of making the product that your user wants and needs, instead of whatever you think they need. The decisions made in UI design (like "adding more whitespace") are not made arbitrarily. They are not made because someone thinks it looks pretty. They are the result of years of user research and A/B testing, just like our programming paradigms are the result of years of research. It would be arrogant to dismiss all this effort by millions of people based on personal opinion. That being said, the Office ribbon is a complete clusterfuck, and kind of the worst example you can find of modern UI design. That also being said, I do think the original post is making a false comparison. Of course UI's will be designed to fit the technology of their age. If you only have limited screen space you want to conserve it as much as possible, hence why the toolbar approach was chosen for Word 97, as even screens of 1024x768 resolution were rare back then. The ribbon UI was designed for an age where larger screens were common and it could be afforded to take up more pixels. In fact if you were to put a 40px toolbar on a modern 4K screen it would be tiny, hard to see and hard to click on. Putting the modern ribbon UI on an old 800x600 screen that it was not at all designed for is pushing an agenda.