> But you really don't, though.
No, I really do, you know. Sure, if there's a logical structure in information, you'd do well to highlight it - as well as any relative relevance of pieces of info (IFF you know what task I'm solving). But I'm not 3 y.o. anymore, I can handle more than 5 lines of text on a page. Please don't hide information from me just because you think it's not relevant to the most basic use case.
I'm strongly with Tufte on this one. Presenting information is about dumping it all on the person with minimum artsy bullshit, and helping the viewer make sense of it efficiently. Modern UX paradigms however go in the completely opposite direction - hide everything, remove features, decrease information density.
There's a reason NASA mission control look like this:
http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-090313a-lg.jpg
and not this:
https://i.imgur.com/4CqzSb4.png
even though the latter is exactly what modern UX guidelines would call for.
If you want to build tools to help people solve problems efficiently, make tools. If you want to make a safe-for-work mental masturbation art piece, which is what most mainstream UX guidelines boil down to, then by all means. I just don't want to have it anywhere near me when I have problems to solve.
--
> intuitive interfaces are for kids
There's only one intuitive interface in the world, and that's the nipple. Everything else is learned.
As for months/years or training - sure, there maybe (or maybe not even training in the tool per se, but more like general education; you need to know what the data shown actually means). But in a typical tool, 10 seconds or even 5 minutes of training won't kill anyone and would vastly improve efficiency. Want a proof? Video games. Each one has a custom, specific UI. RTS games have so many stuff on screen that they often have tutorials and in-game help. And 8-year-olds have zero problems with understanding all that in under 5 minutes. Outside of gamedev, people seem to have forgotten the concept of introduction, tips and tutorials.
Please backtrack a minute: What we're trying to debunk is that "Whitespace is always bad". The rant you're going into, here, is that some tools are oversimplified or don't give you immediate access to functions you need. That's the tool not doing its job - it's bad UX. Nobody will argue against that.
It also has nothing to do with whitespace.
> Outside of gamedev, people seem to have forgotten the concept of introduction, tips and tutorials.
SMB 1-1 is often praised as having outstanding video game level design. One of the reasons is exactly because it doesn't use "tips and tutorials". It intuitively teaches you to run towards the right, to jump, how to kill enemies and discover secrets without ever popping a tooltip on the screen. Not that those are always bad, mind you, but intuitiveness is game design by excellence.
If you want a delimiter then use a delimiter, perhaps a line? One of my main gripes with "modern" UI are UI elements which have no defined border on them. For example, how do I know where's the border between two buttons, or whether there's any inactive space between them, when I see only text separated by whitespace (or for that matter, whether they're buttons at all or just text labels, which I argue should have no border)? It's quite disorienting.
The thing is, you're talking about very specific examples. My point is that especially in UX design you can't use absolutes like that, such as "whitespace is always bad" or "whitespace is always good". This was also the author's point and this idea that "instead of whitespace we should use lines", "instead of whitespace we should pack things tighter" and so on is absurd.
Now here's UX Myth #35: "Modern UIs have good, established UX". Desktop, web, most everything I've seen are UX disasters blindly following trends. And just because you throw UX designers at a problem doesn't mean they will do a good job at it.
UX design is very much a "fake it till you make it" industry. It's based on good principles and mostly the scientific method, but it has a lot of reproducibility issues because it deals with a lot of subjectiveness. Also, some good UX principles may not apply in all situations.
And think about this: Most people are actually bad at their job. The majority of devs and web designers aren't working at Google/Facebook, they're making awful wordpress sites. This is less visible in UX design but it's still true - the majority of UX devs aren't good.
> I know how to manage information
But you really don't, though. If I replied with a 20 lines efficiently-packed wall of text with no paragraphs or linebreaks, you'd complain. If you were looking at a UI that was simply packing UI elements like the lego set for a giant cube, you'd be the first one commenting on its poor usability.
This is what it's like to have no whitespace: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
--
You know, this exact attitude pisses me off. The #1 complaint in open source software is how poor the UX is in most of it. Famously, the software is "designed for its programmer", with the interface built to be as simple to code as possible.
It doesn't change because the community is full of devs arrogant enough to think that their users "know how to manage information" and will make sense of it all. They "don't need to be treated like children" because, obviously, intuitive interfaces are for kids.
OK, I get it, you've had bad experiences with whitespace. The G+ homepage is an abomination. Author isn't arguing a tiny column of text surrounded by two giant white columns is good design. Doesn't mean it's always bad.