They contort themselves to redefine the word density, when what they should have said is that a good interface for humans maximizes information without losing visual salience (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_salience). That is, local density BUT ALSO clear-to-the-human-eye boundaries between information sets.
See the famous (still? hopefully?) Kadir&Brady paper "Saliency, Scale and Image Description" from 2000 for an explanation of how encapsulating information in something visibly distinct, like whitespace, increases the visual saliency of that information: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~timork/Saliency/ijcv_SalScale.p...
And even then it's user/domain specific. What is salient for a user who's an occasional user of your software vs someone who uses your software professionally every day is very different. You stop having to tune for a visual language that's universal-ish and instead have the ability to build-out a denser set of metaphors.
The "design needs to be understandable by the person writing the check who will never use it" problem is all over enterprise sales leading to software that doesn't need to look like $trendy_consumer_app but has to anyway to get the sale.
This seems to be begging for a user-switchable "dense mode" (like the fad of "dark mode" switches), which swaps the "buyer-oriented" CSS to the "I-use-this-every-day" oriented CSS.
I'm hopeful that the CSS prefers-reduced-data media feature[1] may one day help introduce this sort of thing. Sadly not yet supported by any browser except behind flags
Frames are out, whitespace is in. I wonder if the 30-year fashion cycle applies and it will be cool/retro to have compact, discoverable UIs in the 2030s.
The type of visually dense user interface is still around where it’s unavoidable due to the complexity of the data model, e.g. DAWs, game engines and photo editing software.
But for simple consumer facing apps or websites, I don’t see it making a comeback, as it is more aesthetically pleasing and more usable to have simpler / sparser user interfaces for less tech savvy people.
> The type of visually dense user interface is still around where it’s unavoidable due to the complexity of the data model
No, it's not about the data model, that's a completely orthogonal matter. You could add more whitespace to e.g. Darktable, and put functionality which doesn't fit anymore into e.g. menus.
It's about the software being used for focused work. People invest some time learning it, but then expect that the work will be fast and efficient. More whitespace will mean you have to do more clicks to do the same thing in comparison to a more dense UI which costs time.
> and more usable to have simpler / sparser user interfaces for less tech savvy people.
I'd say it's often the opposite. More visible data presents more context, more opportunity to lead the user and visually explain what's going on. You need to invest more into arranging such screens correctly, but when designed well, their UX will be superior to low-context low-information space-filled screens.
Also depends if the user really wants to/must do the task or can just give up and go do something else when the initial density is overwhelming/learning curve is too steep.
> They contort themselves to redefine the word density,
Not once does the term "word density" occur. They talk about Tufte's concept of "information density," though. Edward Tufte is really must-read for any designer or anyone working with them.
> what they should have said is that a good interface for humans maximizes information without losing visual salience
And Tufte talks about that, too. I'm sure the author realized this.
See the famous (still? hopefully?) Kadir&Brady paper "Saliency, Scale and Image Description" from 2000 for an explanation of how encapsulating information in something visibly distinct, like whitespace, increases the visual saliency of that information: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~timork/Saliency/ijcv_SalScale.p...