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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Whitespace is good and functional in some contexts but it's detrimental in others. Imagine an Excel sheet with only 10 rows per screen, light gray text and no borders around cells. And yet this is the reality of many lists on many modern web sites. Less than 10 items per page when I could easily read 30 or 40 of them at once instead of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

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Vanguard's new website is like this :-( used to be a medium dense table easy to compare records now on my 27" 4k monitor i can see only a handfull and its scroll city :-( https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/products/en/overview

Can't help but think of Dieter Rams design principles. Do those principles apply for websites? I mean they are products in a way.

For this particular website I think the design is obstructing the functionality. "Good design is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression."

That's absolutely spot on! Thanks for bringing that argument up. There's a fine line between aesthetically pleasing but functional and artistically inclined and obscure when it comes to this, and it should really be up to the users' preferences. E.g. GMail got it right from the start: let the user choose their way of doing things. If the user wants 100 rows per screen or 10 rows per screen, who are you to deny the user? :)

And often scrolling with auto load, so you never really know how far you are from the bottom of the list.

Thank God for “download CSV.” I think it’s funny that I feel like some sites are just captchas to find the link to pull down the data into excel.

I wonder if people like this stuff? I mean are there people who mindlessly scroll through this crap and like it?

If someone could mockup a modern card-style design for excel incorporating the above, I think people will really get the inefficency of web sites today.

Something like this? https://i.imgur.com/lBIxryc.png

Awesome! This looks pretty on a slide deck and is an absolute nightmire to use.

AWS did something similar in the new EC2 console. Too much whitespace, too little information. I'm glad they iterated and improved information density.

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