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A little unrelated, but the information density in modern UIs is making me feel old. Was it always that way? Sometimes there's way too many links/too much conte

A little unrelated, but the information density in modern UIs is making me feel old. Was it always that way? Sometimes there's way too many links/too much content presented all at once. I know people have been talking about the trend towards mobile for some time and how that's affected density. The other day I was browsing Blizzard's battle.net website to purchase the old school Diablo 1. I was expecting it to be the easiest thing in the world, but it actually took me a few minutes to figure out how to navigate their website. I'm not sure why... The other example I was thinking of was Amazon. The home page is packed with product recommendations. I'm currently getting pet wellness product recommendations, even though I don't own any pets? If you accidentally hover your mouse over a menu bar, you get these giant drop-downs which cause the rest of the screen to darken. Some drop-downs are text (such as the one for your account in the top right). Others are just drop-downs covered with large icons. I think the drop-down for your account is egregious. 99% of the time I go to Amazon to buy a single product. Music Library? Start a Selling Account? Kindle Unlimited? Wtf? None of this is relevant to me.

JohnFen 2y ago
I have the opposite problem with modern UIs. They tend to be too sparse in terms of information density.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  I think the main problem is the lack of color and contrast. It makes it very difficult to present information in a way that makes sense. White space is one option to add structure to the information, but it's arguably not a very good one.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > I think the main problem is the lack of color and contrast. That's a real issue, yes. Modern UIs seem to be actively antagonistic toward users in many ways, and that's certainly one of them.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
Yes it was always quite dense, but screens were physically smaller and pixels were physically larger, so the overall amount of displayed on a computer monitor has increased a fair amount.
navjack27 2y ago
It's fake information density. We have so many pixels available but it's just not used correctly anymore.

JohnFen 2y ago

I have the opposite problem with modern UIs. They tend to be too sparse in terms of information density.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
I think the main problem is the lack of color and contrast. It makes it very difficult to present information in a way that makes sense. White space is one option to add structure to the information, but it's arguably not a very good one.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > I think the main problem is the lack of color and contrast. That's a real issue, yes. Modern UIs seem to be actively antagonistic toward users in many ways, and that's certainly one of them.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

Yes it was always quite dense, but screens were physically smaller and pixels were physically larger, so the overall amount of displayed on a computer monitor has increased a fair amount.

navjack27 2y ago

It's fake information density. We have so many pixels available but it's just not used correctly anymore.