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Comment by logicprog | Hacker News Reader

It's strange, I much prefer a substantial amount of padding to my interfaces. Having a good amount of padding lowers the visual noise/clutter and gives everything room to breathe, which may not give a specific practical advantage, but makes me feel less anxious looking at it.

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It's strange, the absence of padding gives me room to breathe, because if I can quickly scan a menu with my eye then I feel I have good overview and control over affairs. With more padding, you cannot do the same scanning motion with the eye, you have to read each item as a single atom unto itself, and suddenly the menu has become a jungle of megaliths where it's easy to get lost.

There is research out there that shows use of white space can improve things like reading speed and comprehension.

An example for text paragraphs: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Reading-Online-Text%3A...

I think it really depends on individuals though. If you can memorise a dense screen of buttons you'll be able to work faster, avoid scrolling etc. But it'll make the UI harder to use for people who don't use it regularly.

Ultimately, every UI has to strike a balance. If you do it right you'll piss off both sides equally.

The ever smaller seeing slots in the "knights jousting helmet of ui" give me anxiety because I ride to battle and work with that things low info density.

That study itself shows mixed results and tradeoffs, and so I think saying it is about regular users vs. power users does this a dis-justice... they didn't even find an effect for leading (which is what most people seem to want to manipulate).

Padding's great on my desktop with two 24" monitors. On my one-screen 13" laptop it's less welcome.

Okay fair haha

Padding still gets in my way on a 38" ultrawide with two 24" monitors next to it, because my poor (uncorrectable) vision requires substantial UI scaling.

If you can use tiny fonts for everything else I'm sure the padding is less painful but it's super annoying if you have to scale things up and you can actually get completely lost in it if you have to use much fullscreen magnification.

This would be less frustrating if I could easily scale up UI fonts without also scaling up the whole UI proportionally, along with the padding.

In terms of apps in my life with annoying padding or wasteful use of screen real estate, though, I have to say Firefox doesn't even remotely make the list.

I uses a 40inch 4k monitor. The padding looks horrible. Chrome is not better in this regard though

Whitespace can be a good thing as you note, but thoughtful allocation distribution is critical, particularly on desktop operating systems. Firefox default isn’t the worst here but it’s also far from the best.

> which may not give a specific practical advantage

It, in fact, gives a specific practical disadvantage.

I mean, I don't really care to optimize "number of buttons per screen" (and text can be as dense as it wants, although I usually set my font size to 16pt or above) but to each their own.

The relevant cost of too much padding isn't fewer buttons on the toolbar. It's that too little of the screen is actually showing me the web page I want to see.

It's usually most important to quantify in the vertical axis; today's bloated touch-oriented UIs are horrific for 16:9 wide screens. Add up the taskbar, window title and tab bars, URL toolbar, the 72pt dickbar menu at the top of the web page with single-line labels, and the cookie banner at the bottom of the web page, and you're lucky to have half of the shortest dimension of your screen devoted to real content until you start excising the bad UI elements. It's like being back in the 1990s and seeing the old horrors of people who said yes to every adware toolbar that asked to install itself, except we're now wasting far more vertical space for far less functionality.

That feeling of anxiety when looking over software should be taken as a cue to get better at it, not a feeling to be processed as such. Because it goes away as mastery goes up. Pretty soon all that whitespace becomes anxiety-inducing in and of itself

I think you're making condescending assumptions in order to explain away my different preferences, and I don't appreciate that. The feeling I'm experiencing is not anxiety at not knowing how to use the software or read the information presented, I am very comfortably a power user of basically every piece of software I use regularly. It's simply the fact that high levels of visual noise are more difficult to process than when information is clearly separated out and grouped and given enough visual space to be processed independently. Dense interfaces are just less visually restful. This is why I actually tend to prefer pieces of software with little interface at all, just keybindings, like my config of emacs. And I see no reason why being a power user would inherently make white space anxiety inducing, since there is no sensible psychological mechanism for the two to be connected in that direction, unlike the sensible psychological and vision processing connection between dense cluttered interfaces and a feeling of visual clutter.

Furthermore, my feelings in this matter extend far beyond user interfaces: not only do I prefer clean user interfaces with generous use of negative space, I prefer that in my books, and the walls of my house, and the organization of my room. If my wall was covered in posters and sticky notes, instead of a nice clean beige with one or two posters, that would make me feel anxious as well, and it isn't because I don't know how to read a post-it.

I have a few decades worth of experience with software and cluttered UIs just suck.

Same here, but there is a difference between cluttered and dense. Cluttered sucks, but dense is incredibly empowering.

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