I remember when redesigns added features and ease of use, rather than removing features and adding whitespace. When these companies weren't secure monopolies, they felt they had to compete.
With how often people mention increased whitespace I feel like there should be a 5 inch gap between every element by now. Looking back at e.g. Windows 98 the screenshots seem small but back then most users had sub 96 DPI standard monitor setups (e.g. 1024x768 @ 15" would be a decent setup). When you correct for that the actual space used by buttons on e.g. YouTube today vs systems back then hasn't changed nearly as much as one would think and the gaps between desktop icons are pretty big too.
Look at the menu bars in Office 97 it had up to ~25 buttons from left to right on your 1024x768 15” screen. That’s vastly more dense than you see today even adjusted for DPI.
You can't compare it with a 15" screen because that resolution would have been something like a 20-21 inch screen at typical DPI back then.
Nonetheless, number of buttons left to right is a weird metric to pick considering even leaving DPI unadjusted doesn't leave a big difference in the actual number of separate horizontal clickable zones https://i.imgur.com/dETv7wY.png. Usually whitespace complaints on Ribbon focus on the extra vertical spacing e.g. section names like "Font" or "Alignment" taking a line of space that used to just be the next row of buttons. That I'll say is actually a little larger in the last 27 years, even after DPI adjustments, just, again, not nearly as much as one would expect for the number of times you hear about it - considering said Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
> You can’t compare it with a 15” screen because …
We’re at the point where resolution isn’t particularly relevant. People want the same UI on a 1080p vs 4k 15” screen because mouse/touchscreen precision and eyesight doesn’t double when resolution doubles.
> Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here.
But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
> We’re at the point where resolution isn’t particularly relevant. People want the same UI on a 1080p vs 4k 15” screen because mouse/touchscreen precision and eyesight doesn’t double when resolution doubles.
That is exactly why I'm comparing the target DPI rather than talking about how many icons fit in a 1024 pixel row. The 90s were a time when the idea screens should have an effective DPI of > 72 was new. Nowadays we have finished the migration to the effective 96 as the standard DPI. To view an image from a time the effective DPI was supposed to be 72 on a modern screen you need to scale it ~1.33x larger so that you're back to having an effective 96 pixels per inch image to output (for the exact same reason you say you need to scale the 4k to appear the same when it's a 15" output, just from the other direction).
> In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here.
>
> But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
Well it's not a very short stick considering the button comparison image didn't even correct for the above scaling :p. Web does have massive whitespace, but not because design really changed. E.g. here is a side-by-side of YouTube now and YouTube 2006: https://i.imgur.com/tYm0OoU.png and honestly whitespace has decreased with the content filling in those blanks in the "traditional" design. "But wait!" you say "When I look at YouTube I see massive swaths of blank space e.g. on the sides!" and well, sure, you do in some pages https://i.imgur.com/RfzXTeK.png but it's massively less than the legacy design's side whitespace https://i.imgur.com/mDjPFuB.png. The difference here is not that the web started shooting in massive amounts of whitespace into archived YouTube pages it's that the legacy design got to assume most viewers have a small 4:3 monitor and everything will need to fit in that small box whereas nowadays we have big 16:9 monitors but expanding the design to use all of that extra space only goes so far (but still farther in the "use less whitespace" design direction than the "use more"). YouTube also has new designs for certain situations that make it so any screen of any dimension has minimal whitespace usage: https://i.imgur.com/kHBH8Vk.png (vs a linear column list in the legacy design). Despite this people still blame the new YouTube design as having added new whitespace vs the old design.
Filling the screen with two buttons labeled Yes and No is in effect almost all whitespace even if the entire page is clickable.
Consider the modern version of YouTube in terms of separate clickable elements rather than the space between images / giant buttons and it’s mostly whitespace. So from that perspective modern YouTube has 4x the whitespace as the 2006 page even if it’s not as obvious.
This directly shows up in how few buttons you see from left to right when there are buttons and the amount of dead space around the up and downvotes etc.
