[matte_black]

It can certainly waste space. And a lot of it. I’ve seen designers redesign tight tabular data layouts into light and airy cells of data and it ends up displaying 60% less information on a screen, requiring more scrolling from a user. This is exactly the kind of thing enterprise apps don’t need, but it looks good for a consumer app.

[Raphmedia]

That's an example of badly thought-of white space.

[PeterisP]

If it's important for you to fit as many rows in the screen as reasonably possible with maximum readability, then doing the separation with some separator takes less pixels/distance than separating them with whitespace.

There's not much to think about the whitespace in such a scenario - it's a simple yes/no experiment; you can try to simply remove the separating line. If the resulting whitespace ensures good enough readability/separation, then it works; if it'd need increased spacing, then it's worse than having the separator and not worth thinking about how much extra spacing you'd want - the answer to that is as little as possible, i.e., zero.

[Raphmedia]

Not all empty space is "white space". Simply adding random paddings/margins around form fields isn't making good use of "white space". It's simply adding blank empty space. It's a dead weight on your page.

"White space" is negative space. It's something you should think of as an active part of the design.

One of the first rules of web design is "content is king". As a rule of thumb, any use of white space that makes your content harder to reach, read or see is a bad use of white space. It's breaking the "content is king" principle.

No part of your design should break the main web design principles. While there's no agreed upon list, "content in king" (or however you word it) is always present.

In short, yes, I agree.

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Edit - A nice description of it:

"White space (negative space) is the area between design elements. It's another tool for designers to design for the user experience (UX). Remember that white space is not necessarily white; it’s just the name to indicate spaces where there are neither user interface (UI) elements nor specific content.

As a designer, you can introduce white space based on four main factors:

- Content,

- Design,

- user and

- brand

Use macro white space to organize content in the layout and direct the user through the blocks of content shown. Use micro white space inside the design element features as seen in the text, images and content blocks.

We can also approach white space as being passive or active. Passive white space does not have a specific role in the design other than facilitating the user experience. It is all about being easier to read. Active white space guides the focus and attention of users. It is more about standing out and making a statement." https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-po...

[matte_black]

This is consumer app mentality.

Enterprise apps are expert systems, they are not designed for the masses. Your goal is not to surprise and delight, your goal is to help people get shit done and go home. That means data needs to be organized tightly and densely, forms often have a lot of inputs, tables often have a lot of columns and tons of rows. A simple separator line between rows and columns, and perhaps alternating background colors for even and odd rows is all you need. Think something that looks more like an Excel spreadsheet, and not some social network with documents.

If a new feature is needed, it needs to plug straight into the existing design wherever there is space. There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just confuse an employee who got used to the previous one.

[Raphmedia]

It seems that everyone here think of white space as actual white colored wide spacing.

Here, take a look at this example and tell me that the left paragraph is something you would use or want in an enterprise application: https://imgur.com/a/mIBZz

> There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just confuse an employee who got used to the previous one.

I very much disagree and have experience with such tasks.

One of my main task right now is to manage an in-house ERP. Before I started to work here, there were no front-end developer, no UX expert and no designer.

Every screen was a pizza. The previous developers simply piled on changes and everything quickly became a mess.

Last year, we changed half of the screens (early 2000 style) to modern user interfaces. Out of the ~150 employees working with the software, only one was resistant to change. It was one of the newest hires and had just been trained with the previous version of the screens.

Two months in, she admited that the newest version was way easier to use and that she would have had an easier time training on it. Everyone else simply adjusted easily from the cramped design of the previous version.

Smart use of white space isn't about making everything like one of Apple's websites. It's about managing your negative space in such a way as to guide the eyes of the end user.