Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF.
Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them.
That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".
My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?
I hate it.
There's nothing you can do. Computing stopped being about expert users the minute the rest of the world got online. Now the giants control all the devices, platforms, and mindshare. They will never cater to you. Informed users aren't the ones clicking the ads or buying the things as intended.
We've crossed into the gravity well of user hostility, and there's no longer any escape.
I hate it too.
I spent several minutes bashing around, double tapping, longpress, force press, went into settings to look for toggles. Had to google it eventually. Turns out you do this by swiping left. And i had actually tried to swipe sideways before, but only right.
Once you know it it's actually very convenient, but discovering it is near impossible.
Sometimes by accident, sometimes from hearing about it from others, sometimes from searching on Google for how to do something.
I miss the days when software actually came with very detailed documentation for the user. They had their hidden features too, but at least there was documentation for them.
Of course, hiding everything behind that is not good, but when I look at apps like FairMail that try to show you what you can do directly, it just gets very confusing and the space left for the actual content becomes miniscule.
The same way power users discover e.g. keyboard shortcuts, I imagine.
At least keyboard shortcuts are visible directly in the menus, for both Windows and Mac.
I think it's good design to hide certain functions behind "..." - For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally flagged a post on HN just because my finger accidentally touched my phone or because I was trying to click the comments link a few pixels away (which is the feature that people want to access on 95% of clicks that occur in that region). If I had to hit "..." first, it would never happen because I would have just accidentally opened a menu. (And if you flag something, you may never be able to unflag it because it loses ranking and appears at another position somewhere on the site or disappears entirely).
Users are not customers now, they are cattle. You farm their attention and don't care about enabling them.
https://www.imgur.com/DcL05OA.gif
(This could be a subset of infantilization, since this art style seems to come from books for toddlers.)
If everyone hated this and considered it "corporate," it wouldn't be the one used by some of the animation studios that create the most popular content (e.g. Kurzgesagt).
"Here we love people, even if they have enormous hands!" https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbWYR4lWkAEOgAo.jpg
"I don't care if you're white, brown, black, orange, or purple!" https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Aleg...
This is very low on my list of grievances though. I like those vector characters quite a bit more than the stock photos they replace.
Kurzgesagt mentions on its patreon that they used to spend on average 150 hours on each episode and are now at up to 500. While the style stayed mostly the same I think there is now also a lot more going on visually than in the early videos.
While the uncluttered design for something someone only uses a couple times might be fine to avoid overwhelming someone. If you use it daily and even multiple times a day that can make it harder to use.
It also remind me something i read about a ticket kiosk for some transit system. They updated the kiosk with simpler interface to select various things. While effective for infrequent riders, people who would purchase tickets daily found it much slower because the old kiosk allowed them to type in codes they memorized.
I'd say that the "flat" trend was started by Microsoft with Windows Mobile and Windows 8. Apple and Google followed (for once Apple didn't start the trend). I liked it at the time, maybe for the novelty, but it quickly faded. Still I understand why people may like it.
Never have I ever heard of a user wanting a unified experience. I have heard plenty of designers though.
What about usability? What about accessibility?
Nope.
Good design has both functionality and form.
Design is not only about being as useful as possible, but also to present something that is beautiful - it is easier to build a relationship with a user when they are compelled to enjoy a product more due to its visual appeal.
I think a lot of developers seem oblivious to the power of aesthetics because they are so ardently in the functionality camp. The density of information on DiskPrices, whist great for a power user, would probably be daunting and overloading for the average user and whilst it has a retro vibe, is catering to a niche - people technical enough to be looking at disk prices.
Functional, high visibility, accessibility, discoverability. There's no bullshit, no hidden anything, it's true minimalism and 100% honest. This is what actual good design looks like. A dark mode would be nice, though.
One of the best designed products I've ever used is the TiVo DVR. We first got one in 1999, the year it came out. I loved it, but realized how well it was designed when I started using other DVRs in the mid 2000s. As a prime example, to delete an episode on a TiVo required pressing one button. On another DVR I had it was six button presses! It was like this for countless things. It was obvious the folks at TiVo had thought long and hard about usability and design and other manufacturers couldn't care less.
Now imagine if TiVo made their remote a rectangular cuboid with hard edges, and all the buttons were hard plastic squares that were all the same color. It would still be much easier for me to delete an episode on the TiVo than on other DVRs, but holding and using the remote would not be a positive experience. Putting some work into the remote so it fits in your hands, the buttons are nice to press, and color and shape of buttons helps you find the button you want would make it so much better (thankfully they did).
Diskprices is similar to the hypothetical TiVo with a crappy remote. Someone worked hard on some aspects of design and usability, but out of either ignorance or arrogance ignored the rest of the aspects.
That said, I disagree with its FAQ claiming whitespace and color wouldn't help. It'd be a lot easier to actually read the data with a light alternating row color, slightly more vertical spacing, and not styling the links as a wall of underlined blue text.
I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this.
There are still some gems that I find here and there: https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/