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Low UI density is the new emperor's clothes in modern UI design. It's being actively promoted by companies in order to cut design costs, but the truth is that i

Low UI density is the new emperor's clothes in modern UI design. It's being actively promoted by companies in order to cut design costs, but the truth is that it's only reasonable on touch interfaces or casual apps. Mouse interfaces are fundamentally different, because you have much more pointing precision, so it pays off to show more data on the screen. You don't have to cram your interface with with spaces to make it scan-friendly, you just use heterogeneous elements and colors. Look at Blender and you'll know it can be done. I'm designing a desktop reference manager (https://getcahier.com https://getcahier.com), and one of its aims is to provide a UI with high information density. The mobile version will be able to adjust the experience, replacing desktop-only interaction patterns with mobile ones, and the UI elements that are shared will be somewhat bigger, so that users are able to interact them with touch. Apart from that, it seems that the whole industry is confused regarding UI styles. UI frameworks are either favoring touch interfaces and degrading the experience on desktop, or vice-versa. Even Windows 10 released certain parts of the control panel with desktop look and feel and others with touch-friendly but desktop-antagonistic screens. It's time we realize that both platforms are different and we shouldn't degrade one in favor of the other.

cageface 2y ago
This is because mobile is where all the money is. All the vendors have neglected their desktop SDKs to such a degree that Flutter is now in many ways the best desktop UI stack. Even Apple has sorely neglected their desktop APIs. Play around with SwiftUI on the Mac for more than a few hours and this will become glaringly apparent.
asoneth 2y ago
> It's being actively promoted by companies in order to cut design costs I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen? My experience has been the reverse -- the companies that chase trends (including but not limited to low-information-density screens and using mobile-first designs for desktop applications) also tend to spend more money on UI design compared to other companies.
- funcDropShadow 2y ago
  > I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen? The question is for whom it saves costs? For the developers of UI framework it certainly saves cost to treat the desktop as a second rate platform and to focus just on mobile. Developers of desktop applications have to pay the price, by working around libraries and frameworks that do not consider them as a first tier clients.
  - sulandor 2y ago
    maybe oversimplified: things on screen take effort. less things, less effort
    - dagw 2y ago
      Deciding what not to put on the screen takes at least as much effort as adding things to the screen.
      - stoperaticless 2y ago
        I sense that you have in mind something like > Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That is the right reaction to over-complicated baroque creations. Important to note, that oversimplification is possible. (There is point at which removal is no longer benefitial)
      - sulandor 2y ago
        rhetorical relation but i agree that minimalism is a worthy goal. though, excessive white-space does not really scratch the "efficient interface" itch
    - asoneth 2y ago
      I've been a designer for a long time, and none of my contracts have ever paid based on the number of things I put on the screen. The design effort required to make a grid or list of data dense or sparse is pretty much identical. (At least in enterprise software the data density typically depends on who makes the purchasing decisions. If novices and/or business folks are the ones making the pick then the software will look sparse. If technical and/or experts pick their own tools then it'll be dense and efficient.)
elschneider 2y ago
I think there is a fundamental difference depending on what kinds of users you are targeting and how often they're using your app. Blender is a prime example of software for professionals, that are also willing the spend a considerable amount of time on learning the UI. A lot of software is not targeting a similar audience and should limit cognitive overload.
- panta 2y ago
  I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it.
  - hk__2 2y ago
    > I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it. I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. IMHO you should limit the cognitive overload but enable power users to increase it. See also Wikipedia, where the main editor is basic but if needed you can switch to the code editor and/or add plugins to make the interface a lot more powerful.
    - KronisLV 2y ago
      > I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. I work on a bunch of enterprise projects and therefore am sticking with the old design, because having more features available at a glance while also fitting as much of the code on screen as possible is definitely nice to have, in addition to my already established habits and knowledge of the UI. But the new UI? It's also really sleek and pleasant, and a joy to use in the cases where I've toggled over to it. Plus, the fact that they worked on adding a compact mode to the new UI is also great to see! Definitely a good experience in my eyes. I think the trick is in giving the user the choice on what to use, if there's no horrible incompatibility between the various iterations of something. For example, the day when the old Reddit UI (old.reddit.com) stops working is also the day when a bunch of people will stop hanging around the place. The problem is that companies often find the additional support needed to be a hassle and just optimize for the majority of users, not all of them - much the same how many games out there don't even have a Linux or Mac release, even in cases where the popular game engines make having one pretty easy! The parent comment above yours is perhaps a bit more mean than it should be, though.
zozbot234 2y ago
Touch interfaces have less pointing precision, but more swiping precision compared to mouse interfaces. The optimal touch interface probably involves lots of pie menus and/or drag-and-drop gestures that ought to easily compensate for the somewhat increased size of initial touch targets. (Note that, by contrast, these gestures tend to be quite awkward when using mouse or touchpad input.)
- LtWorf 2y ago
  Ah, the always easy to discover (only in the mind of the designer) gestures. Let's not forget that with the current gigantic size of phones, I can actually easily reach less than 50% of the screen. The top part is completely out of reach.
  - mst 2y ago
    Because I tend to hold it with my left hand and tap with my right, I've deliberately moved icons around until my most commonly launched apps are as close to the bottom right corner as possible. I've actually stopped using the 'switch between running apps' UI almost entirely now because with that done, it's faster for me to tap to the home screen then on the icon of the app I want to switch to.
- nsonha 2y ago
  gestures are the time wasting way of doing a click
Eudaimion 2y ago
Is Cahier built on top of Zotero? It looks very similar. Good notetaking support is something Zotero lacks, so I see the appeal for an alternative that focuses more on it.
- felipefar 2y ago
  Cahier is built from scratch with native tech. Besides more comprehensive notetaking support, I also want to provide support for synchronization with existing cloud providers (Dropbox, iCloud, etc.).
jwr 2y ago
> Low UI density is the new emperor's clothes in modern UI design I design, develop and maintain an ERP-style application with lots of tables. The fashions in UI design have made my life much more difficult over the last decade. The problem is that designers tend to follow fashion trends. And the trend over the last decade has been "lightweight! clean! lots of space!". This is great if you are making a landing page, not so great if you need to display lots of data. Google made things worse with its terrible UI design, which people accepted as mantra. Yes, there is lots of white. Your screen will mostly display… space. But just try using the Google Ads interface: it doesn't even fit in a normal browser, you need to have an extra-wide window just to see stuff in the tables. Not to mention they keep redesigning it, and every new update is hated by the customers, as well as by Google people (I've been told by Google ads consultants how to switch to the older interface, "which they all use because the new one is worse"). Another problem which compounds the situation for me is that designing tables is not cool. So, UI designers (and self-proclaimed UX experts) will "obsess" over every pixel in iOS-style switches that for some reason have replaced checkboxes, writing blog posts about how things are misaligned, while tables are left as an afterthought. Take a look at all modern UI toolkits: you will find very few with good tables, and likely not a single one with dense tables. Oh, and on the functionality front: JavaScript libraries like DataTables are great for simple things, but are nowhere near a complete solution for complex apps.
danielvaughn 2y ago
I should add that I think Tailwind, much as I love it, has been responsible for much of this problem. Tailwind’s creator, Adam Wathan, wrote a book called Refactoring UI. It’s a book that teaches you how to design, and one of the things it explicitly states is that you should add generous spacing around elements. If you look at Tailwind UI, which is clearly governed by the principles laid out in Refactoring UI, you can pretty much see the blueprint behind 95% of websites today.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shit_game 2y ago
> Mouse interfaces are fundamentally different, because you have much more pointing precision, so it pays off to show more data on the screen. You don't have to cram your interface with with spaces to make it scan-friendly, you just use heterogeneous elements and colors. Another massive consideration is that a mouse (and a keyboard, if you want to expand from UI to UX) pairs that precision with significantly more available control actions - LMB, RMB, MMB, scrolling, and hovering. With a mouse, the edges and corners of the screen are the easiest and most reliable areas to interact with; this is the inverse of touchscreen UIs, in which the center of the screen is the most ergonomic area of the screen to use, and edges and corners are practically unusable, leading to large margins in almost every UI targeting them. With controls like LMB/RMB, you can also have functionality _immediately_ available wherever the pointer is located, which is now quintessential for practically all desktop applications, and which can't be faithfully emulated with touchscreen UIs.

cageface 2y ago

This is because mobile is where all the money is. All the vendors have neglected their desktop SDKs to such a degree that Flutter is now in many ways the best desktop UI stack. Even Apple has sorely neglected their desktop APIs. Play around with SwiftUI on the Mac for more than a few hours and this will become glaringly apparent.

asoneth 2y ago

> It's being actively promoted by companies in order to cut design costs I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen? My experience has been the reverse -- the companies that chase trends (including but not limited to low-information-density screens and using mobile-first designs for desktop applications) also tend to spend more money on UI design compared to other companies.

funcDropShadow 2y ago
> I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen? The question is for whom it saves costs? For the developers of UI framework it certainly saves cost to treat the desktop as a second rate platform and to focus just on mobile. Developers of desktop applications have to pay the price, by working around libraries and frameworks that do not consider them as a first tier clients.
- sulandor 2y ago
  maybe oversimplified: things on screen take effort. less things, less effort
  - dagw 2y ago
    Deciding what not to put on the screen takes at least as much effort as adding things to the screen.
    - stoperaticless 2y ago
      I sense that you have in mind something like > Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That is the right reaction to over-complicated baroque creations. Important to note, that oversimplification is possible. (There is point at which removal is no longer benefitial)
    - sulandor 2y ago
      rhetorical relation but i agree that minimalism is a worthy goal. though, excessive white-space does not really scratch the "efficient interface" itch
  - asoneth 2y ago
    I've been a designer for a long time, and none of my contracts have ever paid based on the number of things I put on the screen. The design effort required to make a grid or list of data dense or sparse is pretty much identical. (At least in enterprise software the data density typically depends on who makes the purchasing decisions. If novices and/or business folks are the ones making the pick then the software will look sparse. If technical and/or experts pick their own tools then it'll be dense and efficient.)

elschneider 2y ago

I think there is a fundamental difference depending on what kinds of users you are targeting and how often they're using your app. Blender is a prime example of software for professionals, that are also willing the spend a considerable amount of time on learning the UI. A lot of software is not targeting a similar audience and should limit cognitive overload.

panta 2y ago
I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it.
- hk__2 2y ago
  > I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it. I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. IMHO you should limit the cognitive overload but enable power users to increase it. See also Wikipedia, where the main editor is basic but if needed you can switch to the code editor and/or add plugins to make the interface a lot more powerful.
  - KronisLV 2y ago
    > I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. I work on a bunch of enterprise projects and therefore am sticking with the old design, because having more features available at a glance while also fitting as much of the code on screen as possible is definitely nice to have, in addition to my already established habits and knowledge of the UI. But the new UI? It's also really sleek and pleasant, and a joy to use in the cases where I've toggled over to it. Plus, the fact that they worked on adding a compact mode to the new UI is also great to see! Definitely a good experience in my eyes. I think the trick is in giving the user the choice on what to use, if there's no horrible incompatibility between the various iterations of something. For example, the day when the old Reddit UI (old.reddit.com) stops working is also the day when a bunch of people will stop hanging around the place. The problem is that companies often find the additional support needed to be a hassle and just optimize for the majority of users, not all of them - much the same how many games out there don't even have a Linux or Mac release, even in cases where the popular game engines make having one pretty easy! The parent comment above yours is perhaps a bit more mean than it should be, though.

zozbot234 2y ago

Touch interfaces have less pointing precision, but more swiping precision compared to mouse interfaces. The optimal touch interface probably involves lots of pie menus and/or drag-and-drop gestures that ought to easily compensate for the somewhat increased size of initial touch targets. (Note that, by contrast, these gestures tend to be quite awkward when using mouse or touchpad input.)

LtWorf 2y ago
Ah, the always easy to discover (only in the mind of the designer) gestures. Let's not forget that with the current gigantic size of phones, I can actually easily reach less than 50% of the screen. The top part is completely out of reach.
- mst 2y ago
  Because I tend to hold it with my left hand and tap with my right, I've deliberately moved icons around until my most commonly launched apps are as close to the bottom right corner as possible. I've actually stopped using the 'switch between running apps' UI almost entirely now because with that done, it's faster for me to tap to the home screen then on the icon of the app I want to switch to.
nsonha 2y ago
gestures are the time wasting way of doing a click

Eudaimion 2y ago

Is Cahier built on top of Zotero? It looks very similar. Good notetaking support is something Zotero lacks, so I see the appeal for an alternative that focuses more on it.

felipefar 2y ago
Cahier is built from scratch with native tech. Besides more comprehensive notetaking support, I also want to provide support for synchronization with existing cloud providers (Dropbox, iCloud, etc.).

jwr 2y ago

> Low UI density is the new emperor's clothes in modern UI design I design, develop and maintain an ERP-style application with lots of tables. The fashions in UI design have made my life much more difficult over the last decade. The problem is that designers tend to follow fashion trends. And the trend over the last decade has been "lightweight! clean! lots of space!". This is great if you are making a landing page, not so great if you need to display lots of data. Google made things worse with its terrible UI design, which people accepted as mantra. Yes, there is lots of white. Your screen will mostly display… space. But just try using the Google Ads interface: it doesn't even fit in a normal browser, you need to have an extra-wide window just to see stuff in the tables. Not to mention they keep redesigning it, and every new update is hated by the customers, as well as by Google people (I've been told by Google ads consultants how to switch to the older interface, "which they all use because the new one is worse"). Another problem which compounds the situation for me is that designing tables is not cool. So, UI designers (and self-proclaimed UX experts) will "obsess" over every pixel in iOS-style switches that for some reason have replaced checkboxes, writing blog posts about how things are misaligned, while tables are left as an afterthought. Take a look at all modern UI toolkits: you will find very few with good tables, and likely not a single one with dense tables. Oh, and on the functionality front: JavaScript libraries like DataTables are great for simple things, but are nowhere near a complete solution for complex apps.

danielvaughn 2y ago

I should add that I think Tailwind, much as I love it, has been responsible for much of this problem. Tailwind’s creator, Adam Wathan, wrote a book called Refactoring UI. It’s a book that teaches you how to design, and one of the things it explicitly states is that you should add generous spacing around elements. If you look at Tailwind UI, which is clearly governed by the principles laid out in Refactoring UI, you can pretty much see the blueprint behind 95% of websites today.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shit_game 2y ago

> Mouse interfaces are fundamentally different, because you have much more pointing precision, so it pays off to show more data on the screen. You don't have to cram your interface with with spaces to make it scan-friendly, you just use heterogeneous elements and colors. Another massive consideration is that a mouse (and a keyboard, if you want to expand from UI to UX) pairs that precision with significantly more available control actions - LMB, RMB, MMB, scrolling, and hovering. With a mouse, the edges and corners of the screen are the easiest and most reliable areas to interact with; this is the inverse of touchscreen UIs, in which the center of the screen is the most ergonomic area of the screen to use, and edges and corners are practically unusable, leading to large margins in almost every UI targeting them. With controls like LMB/RMB, you can also have functionality _immediately_ available wherever the pointer is located, which is now quintessential for practically all desktop applications, and which can't be faithfully emulated with touchscreen UIs.