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Comment by Keegs | Hacker News Reader

I’m interested to know where this idea comes from. Is there a good reference you recommend? My anecdotal experience has been that low density websites like Medium are more stressful than higher density websites like Substack/HN because I have to do more work to read the text on the page.

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I agree with you. Low-density desktop applications cause me more unease because there's more need to scroll to make sure I didn't miss something. It's especially egregious when the designers make the scrollbars invisible (appearing only on hover or use), meaning there's often no indication of more content available via scrolling. It breeds the habit of ritualistically scrolling each pane to make sure you're not missing something.

There's something psychological about the appearance of a low-density display as well. I can't quite explain it, but it causes me a bit of displeasure because it feels wasteful. There are so many pixels available but they aren't doing anything for me. I don't know why this causes me discomfort, but it does.

Finally, it's important for an application like a mail client to not lose sight of the fact that the way people use email varies. I personally use dozens of folders, meaning the density of the folder list should be as compact as reasonably possible so that I don't need to scroll.

I don’t know. Not an UX expert. But I think the key is the right amount of information. Too much and not enough is both equally bad.

But we have much bigger screens than many years ago when thunderbird was initially designed.

Laptop screens stayed mostly the same sizes, so it makes sense to adjust density to the device type you are using or the window size. This is already done for smartphones, mobile websites usually have much smaller paddings. Same is usually done for iOS vs iPad apps.

There's some memories I have, mostly applicable to text/terminal applications... that productivity generally falls off when you have more than a dozen or so actions on the screen at a time. That people are usually better off with sub-menus or other contextual menus over too many options.

I find the UX for GMail, for example to be particularly good, not perfect but very very good for the task. The biggest issue I have with gmail is really folder and rule management.

That's not really comparable though. Medium and substack have one main item: the text (and its headings) while a mail application has the mail content, the subject, replies, timestamps, etc. and you can see a long list of email in a pane plus a list of folders, then you have the actionable items (reply, send, find, etc.). There are more information and actionable items on the list that in an article read in a browser.

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