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How do people feel about white space in web design?
There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.
I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.
Well yeah, that's because it's all designed mobile-first. It's probably also worth noting that sure, people have very high resolution screens now, but if they're over the age of 20 they'll probably be running them at 125 or 150% scaling (if they're over 50 and somehow know enough to touch the slider, even 200%, though other OS UI elements start going fucky at that scaling factor). So your 1920x1080 display at 13" is closer to the old 1366x768 after that scaling.
Also, whitespace provides a clear space where users aren't expecting buttons to be (since mobile design in general necessitates the implicit understanding that if you want to interact with a row, you tap the row- there really isn't space for '90s-style buttons and drop shadows). If you present a list to a user on a phone of information (and this isn't in the "I already know what's in this playlist" sense), you need to provide a place for their non-transparent thumb or fingers to scroll the screen so they can scan the page. Usually this is to the right of the text, but can be placed to the left as well for languages whose words start on the right of the page, if we care about them (and designers are typically, ideologically-speaking, the type of people who will even if they never get any users that do).
Whitespace also provides a space for menus to expand into. For the same reasons as the above (very limited real estate), you can't have a left-side menu any more because if you do you're intruding on the precious space the user has to usefully navigate your app (and you can't have a top-side/bottom-side one because good luck fitting more than 2 words side by side big enough for a user's fat finger to press... and if you failed to impress that you could scroll that menu the functionality to the right might as well not exist). While having whitespace doesn't solve this, it does mean that you can do the cool animations that don't force a total context switch away from the list you were browsing (by showing a sliver of it on the right side, usually).
And you can't go for columns of text unless it's exploring a parent-child relationship (best example being Mail apps), because again, you've run into the "I'm scrolling something I want to read and now my hands are in the way" problem, since 2 columns of text covering half the screen means you're barely reading either of them.
Oh, and even if your users' monitors are big, and they're still using reasonable scaling factors, the website still has to be responsive if it's resized- the cheapest way to do that is to just be in mobile mode always. Besides, if the users all of a sudden snaps your site to the side of the screen, even though the means of scrolling doesn't block the screen itself, the viewport has shrunk so much that you might as well be on a mobile device now anyway.
I don't think the trend is going away until mobile VT-100s stop being the dominant way people use the Web, and as such and I think this problem is going to be with us for a long, long time. (Or until we have an AI that just magically desktopifies the site so you don't have to spend money maintaining two versions, but y'know.)
My greatest complaint for modern UI is that there absolutely is space for 1 pixel of grey on two sides of every button. Modern designers wrongly choose to make "flat" buttons that you can't always tell are buttons.
We've regressed from clear consistent ways to show what can be interacted with to a flat obscure aesthetic.
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There is.
I frequently play an online game which is desktop-first (they kinda partially support mobile, but it renders awfully), but it looks to me that it shares many flaws. One data point.
There's barely space on a mobile device to show 2 buttons with some text side by side on screen at the same time. Maybe 3 can fit comfortably if you're using a phablet. The border is taking up valuable space that you sometimes can't afford to go without should the button's text actually need to be that long... and sometimes that is indeed the case.
The problem with the minimalist mobile design philosophy is that it leaks into places it doesn't belong. There's really no reason that, say, the modern Hitman series of games needs to be all Metro'd up like MS wanted Windows 8 to be, and yet... it is.
Also, it's very cheap to do- you just need to set the color of the box and be done, no color matching the shadows, no problems with color when the button is pressed in, etc. Hell, half the time you just color the text or place the icon and expect the user to guess that it's even a button in the first place; sure, design languages are slowly moving away from that shit because... it's awful, but it's even less work than placing a button is.
I'm not saying discoverability in flat UIs isn't plain awful, because it absolutely is, but given the constraints of the hardware and interface (fat fingers and hand) to work with I'm not that surprised this kind of design is what the industry moved towards. Now if only they'd make it easier for me to obviously show that yes, there's more to this scroll view other than "just hope the text is cut off in a manner that suggests you should scroll down"...
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