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Comment by AlienRobot | Hacker News Reader

Clutter is really beautiful. I wish there was a tutorial on how to design cluttered interfaces. Everything is about minimalism nowadays. I like how in some interfaces you don't have a weird icon for deleting things, you just have "del". 3 letters are worth an icon.

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Minimalism is in direct opposition to first-order retrievability.

Very common example: home kitchens have cabinets, commercial kitchens have shelves and racks. When speed really matters, the cabinet doors need to go.

Our home kitchen has cabinets that are mostly transparent glass. Worst of both worlds? The clutter is easily visible but access is slowed. Really though, I think there is a purpose: doors keep the dust and grease of the kitchen environment away from the items in the cabinets.

But why is speed the only thing that matters all the time?

Kitchens still have cabinets. Where are my cluttered websites at?

I don't think every single website needs "speed." Specially when I go to some websites sometimes and they have a 2 megapixel PNG as favicon but a minimalist, border-rounded flat designe Wordpress theme.

It's ok for every person to have their own preferences on this. Gmail has an information density setting, I always keep mine at "compact", and I can't relate to anyone who uses another option. But it doesn't bother me that they do.

I think you are overestimating the ease of building UI controls. WPF for Windows represents the most advanced system that Microsoft developed, it's very complicated, and there's no real equivalent API for web. The concept of WPF's Visual allows deep customization of a control and lets you build your own primitives. You could build your own Clippy.

At home, feeling relaxation is important. Some interface, vibe is as important as the interface like music apps for example. You don’t want some monotone ui that can kill vibes. Music UI is probably the hardest to do

Having things in plain sight is really critical to keep most people on track.

If people work without things in plain sight, it is because they have committed what is out-of-sight to memory, which is kind of an ongoing burden.

My tool chest is sort of a hybrid - the drawers are sort of an index, and when you open the "screwdrivers" drawer, they are all in plain sight to choose (and return).

I wish more house cabinets had wide shallow drawers to solve other problems this way.

I'm suddenly reminded of this article:

https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...

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