The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?
It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps. Or take Hulu on my Roku, it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis, surrounded by tons of space, and make you expand it, via multiple button presses on the remote.
I once implemented a file list view for a start-up I was working for, off of a mock from the designer, similar to what you see when you are browsing Google Drive or Dropbox in a web browser, but with only one view, a list view with very large icons. The amount of whitespace was massive; use of screen real estate extremely poor. But then, these web UIs never look like the Finder, or Outlook, do they? They could. They could feel almost as snappy, too, with some allowance for network roundtrips. The Finder is actually pretty slow these days, even on a high-end MacBook browsing local files. There are lots of pauses and stutters.
There’s an unspoken rule against labeling things, too, if you can use a row of inscrutable icons instead.
There will always be designers experimenting with taking things away. Apple has done it plenty. What if there were no scrollbars, no ports, no home button or menu bar (just swipe from the edge of the screen), no keyboard, no headphone jack. Sometimes it’s a bold direction, occasionally a clear net negative. But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Often, design “trends” are just trends, in my (admittedly cynical) view; there isn’t necessarily any merit at the core, or the people propagating them seem more interested in conforming to trends than asking what is good. The dynamics of fashion are easy to underestimate as an engineer.
People love to copy things. People who grow up watching action movies and become action movie directors just want to make an action movie with all the action movie tropes. That’s the main thing, not necessarily picking the things that work well in action movies and bringing in some things that just work well, period, that are original or timeless, like good directors or writers do.
Besides people loving to copy, people sometimes think following trends is why something will sell. If you’re making clothing and you aren’t hip to this year’s styles and colors, no one is going to buy your stuff, is the sentiment I presume. It can easily become overwhelmingly about conforming to trends. Designers also tend to put famous people and sources of influence on pedestals and think they will never be 1/10 of the genius of, say, the person who decided that some famous building should look like a pile of mashed potatoes, or that an Apple billboard should just be black text centered on a plain white background. In art, as in philosophy, there is so much pressure to agree that certain people are good, regardless of any objectivity or lay opinions—so much focus on status—that to even think of what you are doing as potentially-good-in-others’-eyes, you need to copy someone or some brand with high status, or somehow attain your own status, is how I think people sometimes feel.
In other words, designers of UIs might falsely think the customer cares about trends and fads, and that their work will be evaluated through a system of reference points and status divorced from actual merit, as can happen in the design world and adjacent spheres (art, fashion, etc).
> The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?
It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.
> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...
At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.
You're describing cargo-cult. The mindless replication of form without consideration for function.
> But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Some people's view of minimalism is frugality for its own sake. It becomes an ideology that has nothing to do with the practical purposes behind the label, "doing away with excess". Excess is whatever is too much, redundant. The quality of something excessive is that you don't notice it when it's gone. You don't miss it. Minimalism is not about replacing a function with another noticeably more convoluted approach. My personal summary of being a minimalist is that you own all of what you need and you use all of what you own. A minimalist may decide that they don't own a fork because they can eat just as well with their spoon. If they can go months without noticing, it's a good call. The moment you see them contorting that spoon while attempting to cut their steak, they've lost the plot. Likewise in UI, the hard to find scroll bars, the greying of texts, the missing buttons are all being noticed by users. It's minimalism gone to seed.
In this horticultural metaphor, I sure hope we'll come to germinate a new and healthy UX maximalism, but so far, with rare exceptions few and far between, I'm not seeing it.
Even Wikipedia, long a bastion of the good old ugly, went ahead and introduced a hamburger menu, replaced the old global sidebar with the article's TOC (collapsed by default with "generous" spacing), and replaced the old right-hand TOC with...whitespace.
I assume you mean the "colored text might be a button to perform an action" thing, not drawing button frames on things like dialog box choices anymore?
I sometimes wonder if that is nothing but a cargo cult started by the dark pattern of wanting to minimize number of people clicking the "Deny" button.
> it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis
That's a good example of something I was thinking of which is cutting off text horizontally as well. Names of songs, artists, and albums in music apps is a common one, or titles in video apps. A lot of times the relevant piece of data (e.g. "part 5") is in the cut off part of the title. It's everywhere. Things should just flow to show all the information according to how much space is needed, just like how this comment is displayed on HN.
First, whitespace makes things look _expensive_, more luxurious (look at all that material we surround our content with). This comes from print, and as screens have gotten bigger (and resolutions have gotten finer) this trend has entered screen design too.
Second is the perennial "grandma argument" - i.e. if your website or software or whatnot is not built in such a way that "a grandma could figure it out" it gets proclaimed "high barrier" and folks say that "nobody will ever take time to learn how this works". This often results in bikeshedding over features which are absolutely clear to anyone who has ever used a computer, are useful - but if the product design is ruled by a person driven purely by aesthetics - the features get killed. The issue though is that most software is useful exactly because it does not place a single button called "Do Thing Nao" in the middle of the screen, but actually tries to be a tool.
Honestly it just boils down to one overhyped method of web design: MOBILE FIRST.
Mobile-first designs create gargantuan gaps of information sparseness on any larger form-factor.
Folks should go back and re-read ethan marcotte‘a Responsive Web Design. He goes from actually a desktop design and shrinks it down. No mention of mobile-first.
So, start with a design, and consider how it works on both form factors EQUALLY. None of this mobile-first crap unless building an app, a whole app, and nothing but a mobile app.
I suspect several of your examples are very likely the result of I18N considerations. Some alphabets/ideographic languages are denser than others. So text areas are set for the compact-est common denominator, and icons are unlabeled for similar reasons.
It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps. Or take Hulu on my Roku, it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis, surrounded by tons of space, and make you expand it, via multiple button presses on the remote.
I once implemented a file list view for a start-up I was working for, off of a mock from the designer, similar to what you see when you are browsing Google Drive or Dropbox in a web browser, but with only one view, a list view with very large icons. The amount of whitespace was massive; use of screen real estate extremely poor. But then, these web UIs never look like the Finder, or Outlook, do they? They could. They could feel almost as snappy, too, with some allowance for network roundtrips. The Finder is actually pretty slow these days, even on a high-end MacBook browsing local files. There are lots of pauses and stutters.
There’s an unspoken rule against labeling things, too, if you can use a row of inscrutable icons instead.
There will always be designers experimenting with taking things away. Apple has done it plenty. What if there were no scrollbars, no ports, no home button or menu bar (just swipe from the edge of the screen), no keyboard, no headphone jack. Sometimes it’s a bold direction, occasionally a clear net negative. But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.
Often, design “trends” are just trends, in my (admittedly cynical) view; there isn’t necessarily any merit at the core, or the people propagating them seem more interested in conforming to trends than asking what is good. The dynamics of fashion are easy to underestimate as an engineer.
People love to copy things. People who grow up watching action movies and become action movie directors just want to make an action movie with all the action movie tropes. That’s the main thing, not necessarily picking the things that work well in action movies and bringing in some things that just work well, period, that are original or timeless, like good directors or writers do.
Besides people loving to copy, people sometimes think following trends is why something will sell. If you’re making clothing and you aren’t hip to this year’s styles and colors, no one is going to buy your stuff, is the sentiment I presume. It can easily become overwhelmingly about conforming to trends. Designers also tend to put famous people and sources of influence on pedestals and think they will never be 1/10 of the genius of, say, the person who decided that some famous building should look like a pile of mashed potatoes, or that an Apple billboard should just be black text centered on a plain white background. In art, as in philosophy, there is so much pressure to agree that certain people are good, regardless of any objectivity or lay opinions—so much focus on status—that to even think of what you are doing as potentially-good-in-others’-eyes, you need to copy someone or some brand with high status, or somehow attain your own status, is how I think people sometimes feel.
In other words, designers of UIs might falsely think the customer cares about trends and fads, and that their work will be evaluated through a system of reference points and status divorced from actual merit, as can happen in the design world and adjacent spheres (art, fashion, etc).