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Comment by Bluestein | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to think projects like these are somehow signaling a return to well designed but information dense, space saving interfaces ...

The amount of bloat, whitespace, extra spacing, "air" and other such waste - starting with (now Google-dead) "Material Design" has been egregious.-

(One can dream ...)

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1. Mobile needs to have somewhat spacious UIs to deal with touch targets needing to be finger sized.

2. Companies don't want to design two very different UIs and by-in-large users prefer their skills transfer across platforms.

3. Accessibility is easier if the design leaves room for bigger font sizes and doesn't require fine motor control. Watching my dad start to noticeably age I'm realizing that even spacious spacious apps don't go far enough in this regard.

I'm not sure how we get to information dense design without something changing the forces that pushed us that way in the first place.

>1.

This is not true. Mobile platforms do help with tapping on small elements. E.g. HN isn't mobile friendly "as is", but I have no issues with tapping any of the links. I've also used Exante mobile trading terminal for some time and had no issues with it either.

I agree that accessibility still is the concern, but watching my grandma struggle with her tablet, it's mostly the fact that buttons aren't buttons and everything jumps around like clowns in circus and cannot stop, instead of being a proper user interface. I bet she'd have similar issues with appliances if their design was just random flat symbols on white surfaces that randomly disappear.

> This is not true. Mobile platforms do help with tapping on small elements. E.g. HN isn't mobile friendly "as is", but I have no issues with tapping any of the links. I've also used Exante mobile trading terminal for some time and had no issues with it either.

Good for you, maybe your phone screen is huge. I routinely tap on the wrong element when using HN on mobile. Even on desktop I have to set the zoom level to 125%.

This is why I miss resistive screens on phones where you had to actually use your fingernail or stylus and it bloody worked so well. Instead, everyone wanted to get rid of buttons for screen real estate and make phones "sexy" and screens should "swipe it up and down Iphone mega mega smooth swipe pinch swipe, magic gestures, etc". And then that drove an entire industry and it's direction for two decades after that, now we're all complaining because we let the designers drive functionality and usability.

Either way, mobile browsers do allow one to "zoom" in into the UI for smaller elements, it's just we're all lazy and don't want to do that.

> Iphone mega mega smooth swipe pinch swipe, magic gestures, etc"

Ghost of Jobs still haunts ...

I'm not vision impaired (I actually have very good vision), and I also zoom HN way in (150%) on desktop. Just feels uncomfortably small and the lines of text are way too long.

4.7" iphone. They enlarge tap regions for tappable elements since forever, so you can’t miss.

If you have 3 tap regions already adjacent before enlargement, how does enlarging them help? Like the w, a and s keys on a keyboard. Making the regions larger will just make them overlap.

Idk how apple does that exactly. I’d just voronoi it if they intersect and tap outside-ish, just like I do with hn vote arrows.

Anyway my point is that you can design interfaces denser than three buttons per screen and they will work. Not that a 5mm block with 8 links in it is a good button bar.

You can miss quite easily if there is another tappable element right next to the one you are trying to click

> I bet she'd have similar issues with appliances if their design was just random flat symbols on white surfaces that randomly disappear.

That sounds like the control panel for my fridge :)

I see and understand your well placed and valid examination.-

True. Mobile (and the path from "responsive" to "mobile native" - ergo, pre conditioned by everything you well mention ...)

... has led us to a what I think is today's sorry state of things.-

I think the best we're going to get is some law or other that requires services not block 3rd party clients so that folks that want hacker-ui-theme, like me, have the ability.

> starting with (now Google-dead) "Material Design"

I thought it was still actively developed. Are you saying this has been killed by Google?

https://m3.material.io/

No Material 3 (Material You) is the design that stock android uses for all its UI components, and more and more third party apps start using it.

Though I haven't seen Material Design Website in a while.

At least the web components are in maintenance mode[0]. Google seems to focus on a new framework called Wiz now.

[0]: https://github.com/material-components/material-web/discussi...

Unrelated to Wiz, the cloud security company Google tried to merge with. [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042034

I seem to recall an announcement a while back about it having been sunset.-

I think it started with Apple when switching from OS 9 to OS X, I couldn’t explain it at the time and still feel disappointed with so much waste of expensive screen estate.

It's a weird turn of event that OS X stayed a much more classic os than what Windows 8 was becoming. I remember that for a long time OS X was wasting less screen estate than Windows 8 and all that mix that was Windows 10.

But since Big Sure it means that it got even worse than what It was with the first version of OS X. I remember how crazy it was it setup a mac emulator, set it's resolution to my mac's resolution, full screen mode, and see how much space you could have with classic Mac OS, it's just crazy and everything remains legible.

Suddenly the windows desktop metaphor makes more sense because you can actually have many windows next to each other. OS X has almost always tried to diverge from than, that lead to great things like exposé, spaces and then mission control but it looks like they never considered to reduce elements size.

> weird turn of event that OS X stayed a much more classic os than what Windows 8 was becoming

Indeed.-

At the time - I seem to recall - it really felt like Win8 was trying to "out-Mac" the Mac.-

You might very well have a point there.-

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