Information-rich screens can reduce clicks and save massive amounts of time, but it's very hard to design information rich interfaces that don't clog your fores

Information-rich screens can reduce clicks and save massive amounts of time, but it's very hard to design information rich interfaces that don't clog your forest for the trees. Add in a requirement that the screen needs to be responsive and work well on mobile, and what was a heavy lift before becomes massive. For example, https://Userify.com https://Userify.com has a very simple (and rather prosaic) interface with not a lot of tools, but it's easier and faster for people to pick up than trying to hook authentication in their Linux boxes to Active Directory or LDAP. The next release, by necessity, will be more complex and powerful because it's getting an approximate metric ton more functionality. We'll try to balance that by fixing the blah design and color scheme, but balancing info-rich interface against functionality on varying size screens is just really hard. Even so, the author is right -- but form follows function still applies. I'd rather have an ugly, but fast and functional, interface over a beautiful and weak interface any day. The app that succeeds in both will be most successful. Ultimately it's an optimization problem.