[inopinatus]

The biggest dissonance for me comes when an administrative backend or line-of-business application is given the sparse whitespace treatment with all the functionality hidden behind opaque submenus and mysterious hieroglyphs.

This seems to be a misguided attempt to apply, to power user interfaces, UX principles that were intended to ease & maximise casual visitor engagement for brochureware or B2C commerce.

What I actually want for these interfaces is high information density and a visible palette of clearly labelled action buttons. And there are way too many product managers that think dropping a bit of table padding, with a "dense mode" toggle, is the answer.