| > Low UI density is the new emperor's clothes in modern UI design I design, develop and maintain an ERP-style application with lots of tables. The fashions in UI design have made my life much more difficult over the last decade. The problem is that designers tend to follow fashion trends. And the trend over the last decade has been "lightweight! clean! lots of space!". This is great if you are making a landing page, not so great if you need to display lots of data. Google made things worse with its terrible UI design, which people accepted as mantra. Yes, there is lots of white. Your screen will mostly display… space. But just try using the Google Ads interface: it doesn't even fit in a normal browser, you need to have an extra-wide window just to see stuff in the tables. Not to mention they keep redesigning it, and every new update is hated by the customers, as well as by Google people (I've been told by Google ads consultants how to switch to the older interface, "which they all use because the new one is worse"). Another problem which compounds the situation for me is that designing tables is not cool. So, UI designers (and self-proclaimed UX experts) will "obsess" over every pixel in iOS-style switches that for some reason have replaced checkboxes, writing blog posts about how things are misaligned, while tables are left as an afterthought. Take a look at all modern UI toolkits: you will find very few with good tables, and likely not a single one with dense tables. Oh, and on the functionality front: JavaScript libraries like DataTables are great for simple things, but are nowhere near a complete solution for complex apps. |