> The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?
It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.
> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...
At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.
It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.
> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...
At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.