Hi there, Matt here.

For most of my career I've been designing dashboards. Maybe it's just an inevitability of being in product design. Or maybe I'm drawn like a moth to the flame of complex products laden with impossible-to-meet expectations of insightful data visualizations.

Design trends have changed plenty in the last 20 years, but one thing has stayed the same: dashboards are supposed to be dense. Absolutely chock full of numbers, charts and graphs, all updating in real time. The expectation comes mostly from a belief that the denser the dashboard, the more understanding it will yield.

Whether or not that expectation is reasonable is debatable. But as an interface designer (and manager of designers), it's important for me to understand how to achieve the density my partners, clients, and stakeholders expect. Until recently I've been satisfied to simply pack all the pieces of the interface close together and call it a day. But is that really density?

Spoiler alert: it's not. So I wrote an essay describing how I came to understand density as much more than just how much stuff is on the page. I hope you enjoy it.

Here's a tune, too: Long Cool World, by North Americans. North Americans is a project by guitarist Patrick McDermott and pedal steel player Barry Walker. It's ambient country music — but the old kind of country, the lonesome cowboy kind, not the new rock and roll blue jeans kind.

Now, on to the essay. I'm including the first few paragraphs, as it's a long one; you might want to just skip ahead and read it on my website.

UI Density

Interfaces are becoming less dense.

I'm usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and "we liked it that way" bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore.

To explain this trend, and suggest how we might regain density, I started by asking what, exactly, UI density is. It's not just the way an interface looks at one moment in time; it's about the amount of information an interface can provide over a series of moments. It's about how those moments are connected through design design decisions, and how those decisions are connected to the value the software provides.

I'd like to share what I found. Hopefully this exploration helps you define UI density in concrete and useable terms. If you're a designer, I'd like you to question the density of the interfaces you're creating; if you're not a designer, use the lens of UI density to understand the software you use.

Visual density

We think about density first with our eyes. At first glance, density is just how many things we see in a given space. This is visual density. A visually dense software interface puts a lot of stuff on the screen. A visually sparse interface puts less stuff on the screen.

Bloomberg's Terminal is perhaps the most common example of this kind of density. On just a single screen, you'll see scrolling sparklines of the major market indices, detailed trading volume breakdowns, tables with dozens of rows and columns, scrolling headlines containing the latest news from agencies around the world, along with UI signposts for all the above with keyboard shortcuts and quick actions to take.

Craigslist is another visually dense example, with its hundreds of plain links to categories and spartan search-and-filter interface. McMaster-Carr's website shares similar design cues, listing out details for many product variations in a very small space.

You can form an opinion about the density of these websites simply by looking at an image for a franction of a second. This opinion is from our subconsciousness, so it's fast and intuitive. But like other snap judgements, it's biased and unreliable. For example, which of these images is more dense?

Both images have the same number of dots (500). Both take up the same amount of space. But at first glance, most people say image B looks more dense.¹

What about these two images?

Again, both images have the same number of dots, and are the same size. But organizing the dots into groups changes our perception of density. Visually density — our first, instinctual judgement of density — is unpredictable.

It's impossible to be fully objective in matters of design. But if we want to have conversations about density, we should aim for the most consistent, meaningful, and useful definition possible.

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