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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
I have the opposite problem with modern UIs. They tend to be too sparse in terms of information density.
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.
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.
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.
It's fake information density. We have so many pixels available but it's just not used correctly anymore.