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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I hate this modern design trend of wasting as much of my screen real estate as possible. It's ugly and it wastes my time, which is rude. Every one of these tables is literally 300% taller than it needs to be. Get rid of all the pointless padding and spaces. You can pack 3x the information on screen.

This looks "modern" but it doesn't look good and it certainly isn't useful. Every time I bring this up in UX review designers look at me like I'm from the moon.

In the "Invoices" table in the preview seven hundred vertical pixels are used to display eight lines of data. That's worse than a VT100 by a factor of three.

https://preview.tabler.io/

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> Every one of these tables is literally 300% taller than it needs to be

Looks fine to me. The page is already pretty information dense, making it even more dense isn't necessarily better, but it's all pretty subjective.

I’m talking about the whitespace within a row. There’s no reason to make a row in the table 3x taller than the text on the row. If you think 8 rows is all your users need that’s fine, but why waste all that space?

Well there is a point to be made that if you don't stack rows without any spacing the user might actually be able to look left and right at different columns without losing sight which line they were even looking at.

Can be partially solved by having alternating colour rows (and frankly it should've been a thing here), but ultimately this is far easier to read then your average excel sheet, at least to me.

And frankly if you're displaying more than 8 rows, you need to add a damn scrollbar and search box, ain't nobody reading all of that. Humans can generally only focus on like 5 things at a time max anyway.

My eyes get lost in the expanse of empty pixels. Tight packing makes visual scanning easier.

Are you viewing this on a TV?

No it doesn't.

It's a dashboard. The point of a dashboard is to present the most important information in an aesthetically pleasing way, not to cram as much informational density per pixel as possible. This is why your UX review designers look at you like you're from the moon - you're not understanding the user need.

My UX designers are building backend operational tooling that I use every day. Batch processing workloads that need babysitting and manual intervention. I often have several windows of these open to maintain multiple pipelines in parallel. Information density is critical in such an application.

There are designers that appreciate the distinction between the way you design a desktop application vs a consumer website / mobile app. A lot of the design literature and discussion seems to be focused on the latter these days.

A lot of things that desktop applications did are missing in most web apps; high information density, resizable panels, panel layouts (side by side etc...), keyboard shortcuts, embedded CLI's, and so on. It makes the user experience a lot worse for power users.

Designers optimize for the common customer, which does _not_ want keyboard shortcuts or embedded CLI's etc.

Most designers happen to serve mostly common customers but there are countless highly used industry specific web applications out there that are navigated primarily by shortcuts, and that software too, has designers. Designers that from my experience are often trying to make B2B, high data density solutions into fluffy UIs despite clear feedback that it's not what users want.

It depends who that common customer is. If you're building a tool for industry and your users are electrical engineers, you would design it differently to a consumer mobile app is all I am saying.

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