I'm actually trying to "redesign" an app (I put design in quotes because I'm a dev and just trying to make a personal project look nice) and one of the struggles I have had is that high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience. So much nicer to have everything you care about in a single screen.
TL;DR
Your app should have the information density that it needs to be:
1. Useful and 2. Help the user avoid operating the app in a way that they don't intend to or is dangerous
Looking fancy is a secondary concern to good function. Typography has an important function because it is how you convey information to your user. Poorly laid out or written text can cause your user to get tired or use your app wrong.
Of course, making a useful interface is a difficult and long job. It is also thankless work, because if you do a good job your users will use your app without even noticing how well designed it is (good design is invisible!).
It's much easier to slap a pretty facade on your poorly designed app and call it done. People will be impressed by it, but struggle to use it.
I would recommend finding physical copies of Josef Mueller Brockmann's books, especially "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" and "The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems". They are both old (pre-DTP) but have great basic advice about how to design pages.
Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.
Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.
They are old-school because they are lazy about it, not because something is already optimized.
Whenever I hear about how great a Amazon is as a company, I just do a single search and am dumbfounded.
Example:
If you type the name of a product - even when it is in their catalogue - it may not come up.
Search for 'mousr' on Amazon and you only see PC mouses.
The only way you can get to the mousr product is by typing the company name.
It's ridiculous.
Tip of the iceberg.
Amazon search is in comparison much more... approximate.
Hmm, I'll give you a hint. You're looking at it.
Fun fact: we're further away from its first release (2001), than it was from Windows 1.0 (1985).
Remember Windows 7?
We're further away from its first release (2009), than it was from XP.
I wouldn't call the CL UI ugly. It's certainly not beautiful, but I'm not sure how it could be described as ugly. There's something in between, right?
How is this an improvement?
Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.
Integrating RES into the main site would've been most of what they needed to get going...
in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.
They need hundreds of millions of new users and those have to come from Facebook and probably on mobile.
The site isn't mobile-friendly though, is it?
It's slow, bloated, and has repeated interstitials demanding you get their app if you deign to use mobile.
[0] The one which you can still reach by adding '.compact' to any reddit url
In particular, faster.
I need to have a supercomputer to scroll past the first few pages.
Although anytime I mention this I fear they'll take it away...
[0]: For example, see /r/CrappyDesign with (https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/) and without (https://of.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign) Comic Sans.
e.g. hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews
Why does this subreddit exist?
> Why does this subreddit exist?
Considering the prevalence of the rebuke "HN is not reddit" on HN, probably for people who want to talk in a more reddit-like style.
So 'tap, tap, tap, tap, enter' becomes 'tap, <locate mouse> click, tap, tap <locate mouse>, click'.
These days it's so hard to organise or browse your own music collection.
On the dedicated "select a playlist" page with the squares, it even freaking re-organizes the squares every time you view it! Imagine if your desktop icons re-organized themselves in some arbitrary way every time you needed to open a program, and you get the utter destruction of muscle memory that can make up for the gaps in efficient design.
Or are you saying the bar is: "as long as there's something worse"
It could be that, in most cases, we only think of the options as ones that we've been introduced to.
We're way too busy with daily life to really think in-depth about everything in hypothetical possibilities, such as "here's a way in which a music app that doesn't exist could do it better." Instead, (unless we're very passionate about music), we tend to only think about the options that have been presented to us.
Material design and minimalism probably have a lot of strong theory behind them, but the cargo culting around them often leads to worse UX. I think a lot of companies reach the "dedicated UX team/person" stage before the "careful A B testing of user flow" stage.
I think this is a big factor in what killed slashdot. They did a big redesign years back that added a lot of whitespace but actually made it incredibly difficult to easily browse comment threads and see quality comments. Similarly, despite the old Reddit interface having a reputation as being "ugly", I hate the new interface and always browse on old.reddit.com, mainly because of the higher density of information that makes it easier for me to scan for posts I want to read.