I asked a Googler about this years ago when Material Design was new. They told me that the general population has a harder time processing dense information views compared with computer geeks. Many folks find devices easier to use when there's less "going on" on-screen at once. If you bump up padding and margins, you not only reduce total visible information, but also spread out your UI elements, making it easier to visually identify which part of the screen holds the information you're looking for.

Edit to add: the way it was explained to me, the gap isn't about education or intelligence, but simply that computer geeks have trained for years at the specific skill of interpreting dense computer screens, in a manner and degree that the general population hasn't.

It's odd that the same general population can read news papers and books. New papers are way more dense than books and they enjoy reading all of it.

How much more dense are screens than a newspaper. Even news websites try to cram in as much as they can on as little space as possible yet they are popular among the same audience. Its more about unfamiliar text on screen more than the dense text.

> They told me that the general population has a harder time processing dense information views compared with computer geeks.

The average computer geek probably has functional literacy at college level, even those that don't actually go to college or quit part way.

Meanwhile:

> According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

So, a pocket memex, a device born for information managers, is now developed, according to what you write, for people with some allergy to information, and to alienate information managers. Because sales, of course. And what is the option for the information managers?

It is odd that a company so focused on diversity forces everyone to adapt to the information processing capabilities of the stupid. Or maybe not odd at all.

Likely due to accessibility: Standard guidelines for Android is that all touch targets should have a 48x48dp minimum size + 8dp spacing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/forproducts/guides/mobil...

https://material.io/design/usability/accessibility.html#layo...

In my experience this is actually a good thing. Many application developers designing their own UI standards often leave buttons and touch targets that are way too small to accurately touch and it annoys the hell out of me. This often happens on the web as well!

That said, I use Android's built-in UI scaling to reduce the size of icons and such that seem to have grown as phone screens became larger.

Even the big guys are guilty of too-small touch targets sometimes. I've always thought this little back button in iOS when an app links to another app is laughably tiny

https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/13/deep-link-navigation-iphone-x...

It's important to note that the hit box for it is much larger than the visual presentation.

I'd argue that a mismatched hitbox isn't great either, but it does solve for the touchability

For Android there's a setting that can scale down the modern UIs to render more on your screens. The "display size" setting seems to fix everything for me, even the UI for some games!

If you configure the setting to be small enough many apps will detect your phone as a tablet, though, leading to some funky tablet layouts. Your mileage may vary, but for me everything works out great.

I tried going one size down in settings and while it does make the system UI better (more space for notifications etc) the majority of apps get unusable - everything is too small and hard to read, plus UI elements are closely packed to be clickable with fat fingers.

I'm hoping that some apps adjust and start responding to the lower scale in a way that still makes it usable but maybe that can't be done and I'm stuck with the ridiculous UI.

> Don't know what the f is going on with "Modern" UIs.

I see this as a confluence of a few different things:

1. Monitors are getting higher and higher resolutions; a 4K display that's less than 27" is going to feel awfully tiny unless you start scaling things up.

2. Things have gotten more complicated over time, and the more complicated they get the more chances that something will mess up. At some point my gaming PC decided that it was going to take 30-90 seconds for the right-click context menu in Explorer to come up, and while it was waiting it would lock up Explorer. Simplification can be a good thing.

3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

Probably some other stuff.

>Monitors are getting higher and higher resolutions; a 4K display that's less than 27" is going to feel awfully tiny unless you start scaling things up.

Does this mean people who _don't_ buy 4K displays at those resolutions are going to be disadvantaged with strangely-huge UIs? (Side note: every OS I use already has display options to scale up UI 100-200+%, but not scale down less than a "normal" 100%.)

It reminds me a little bit of when Apple's retina displays first came out and nobody knew how to handle widely-different resolutions, which resulted in huge UI/icons on normal-resolution monitors and fuzzy UI/icons on high-resolution ones, for the longest time.

> Does this mean people who _don't_ buy 4K displays at those resolutions are going to be disadvantaged with strangely-huge UIs?

My experience so far is that if your monitor is "too small" for a given app the UI will be gigantic, sometimes to the point of being unusable.

If your monitor is "too big" for a given app, the UI will be tiny, sometimes to the point of being unusable.

Because of (I guess?) the way that Windows (so far?) has handled things, I keep ending up with apps which are too large on my laptop's 1080p screen running alongside apps which are too small on my laptop's external 1440p screen.

> It reminds me a little bit of when Apple's retina displays first came out and nobody knew how to handle widely-different resolutions, which resulted in huge UI/icons on normal-resolution monitors and fuzzy UI/icons on high-resolution ones, for the longest time.

This is a great comparison; I think the difference with MacOS is that if you're doing everything "natively" on MacOS, everything "just kinda worked" a lot of the time, but if your app does any custom drawing (e.g. for toolbar buttons) everything went to hell. In contrast, there are a lot of apps on Windows which use native controls and menus and so on which do not handle scaling well at all. Possibly they're using some API that wasn't properly updated, like Win32 or GDI or who knows what else.

I even have one app, which my company makes :/, which has an odd behaviour: if you launch it when you have a 1080p primary display, and then switch to having a 1440p primary display (by plugging into a dock or monitor or whatever) the right-click menu for the system tray icon shows up at the appropriate location for a 1080p monitor - the correct distance from the top and left of the screen - which, on a 1440p display, is near the middle of the screen.

Which reminds me, I need to report that bug.

If you account for the screen size only, even now we have more resolution the scale of elements on screen is bigger than what screen size allows for comfortable reading.

To me these UIs improvements look like "dumbing down" of UI instead. Everything UX now suggests you the action it thinks you want to perform and hide all other options. Take context menu, start menu or taskbar in Windows 11 or in Android see the drop down from top bar which use to have more options visible at the same time in previous versions.

This will surely work for anyone who is using these systems at very basic level (new users, people with accessibility needs?). For everyone else who spend their lives in these for work or hobby this dumbing is frustrating.

It's getting bad again on MacOS. Big Sur made window title bars vastly bigger. Using my new mini on a 1080P monitor is pain. I really hate that no one implements a 75% scaling option for MacOS or Windows.

Saddest part is I have a replacement 1440P monitor showing up later in the week since I had to drag mine to work and it doesn't even help all that much. Macs in stores all have 2-5K resolution screens now ruining things for budget monitor folks with cheap Mac Minis.

New mini? I had a mini and two Mac Pros in a job four years ago and when ARD launched in 1080p the screen was unmanagably cramped and everything was huge.

As someone who used 768p 15" laptop until late 2019, yes, everyone else has to deal with bs huge menus. Oh the number of webpages that would have you scroll horizontally, often with white bar on both sides... The day I upgraded to 1080p I could feel a sense of joy in being able to see the web as it was designed. And now every web developer is beginning to develop on 27" (or less) 4K displays and the target is shifting for less fortunate yet again.

> 3. People designing software are getting older and have worse eyes, so larger, clearer, less noisy UIs are a godsend.

"Modern" UIs most often are anything but clear and less noisy. Part of what made the Windows 95 design so strong was that UI elements were separated by visible lines, you exactly knew what the touchbox of any element was, the behavior and look of UI elements, menus and icons were generally consistent across applications...

I think that's the worst part of the new Firefox UI. Firefox got rid of the defined, rectangular tabs using a colored background with lines between them. Now it's white rounded rectangles floating in a light-gray background with no other visible distinction. Even with perfect eyes, it was hard to tell what was going on without taking a moment to really focus on it.

It clashes heavily with the container tabs add on as well. The new UI adds a coloured bar on top of a container tab, which I always mistake as an open tab since it's far more visible than the actual open tab indicator

There are some tweaks out there which patch the CSS to bring stuff slightly closer to the original style.

Oh, I've managed to get it looking basically exactly like Firefox 90 again for me, but it's still a hassle to have to inject custom CSS on every machine to get an easily-usable interface. And I feel bad for people like my elderly dad who don't have that know-how and will have to just live with Mozilla's indifference to accessibility.

Desktop? Miss me with that shit, I still stubbornly click "not now" whenever I unlock my laptop :D

What's going on is that UI designers keep thinking people care more about balancing negative and positive space than seeing all the information they want. At the same time, UI customizability has gone out of fashion. So we get lowest common denominator mediocrity that looks good in a slide show but is awful to use for serious work.

No company should have full time UI designers on staff. Eventually they look for reasons to justify themselves, and start ruining things that were perfectly fine.

Turn down the UI scaling. That works well enough for me. I also run Nova7 as my launcher, so I can control icon and text sizes independent of the UI scaling.

Scaling UI doesn't increase the number of buttons in the top at drop down visible at the same time. They use to be 9 before Android 10 I think. In Android 12 they are even bigger. Scaling down won't fix it. I already use it scaled BTW.