The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?

It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps. Or take Hulu on my Roku, it will literally only show the first three lines of a four-line movie synopsis, surrounded by tons of space, and make you expand it, via multiple button presses on the remote.

I once implemented a file list view for a start-up I was working for, off of a mock from the designer, similar to what you see when you are browsing Google Drive or Dropbox in a web browser, but with only one view, a list view with very large icons. The amount of whitespace was massive; use of screen real estate extremely poor. But then, these web UIs never look like the Finder, or Outlook, do they? They could. They could feel almost as snappy, too, with some allowance for network roundtrips. The Finder is actually pretty slow these days, even on a high-end MacBook browsing local files. There are lots of pauses and stutters.

There’s an unspoken rule against labeling things, too, if you can use a row of inscrutable icons instead.

There will always be designers experimenting with taking things away. Apple has done it plenty. What if there were no scrollbars, no ports, no home button or menu bar (just swipe from the edge of the screen), no keyboard, no headphone jack. Sometimes it’s a bold direction, occasionally a clear net negative. But minimalism is a thing, it just has to be tempered.

Often, design “trends” are just trends, in my (admittedly cynical) view; there isn’t necessarily any merit at the core, or the people propagating them seem more interested in conforming to trends than asking what is good. The dynamics of fashion are easy to underestimate as an engineer.

People love to copy things. People who grow up watching action movies and become action movie directors just want to make an action movie with all the action movie tropes. That’s the main thing, not necessarily picking the things that work well in action movies and bringing in some things that just work well, period, that are original or timeless, like good directors or writers do.

Besides people loving to copy, people sometimes think following trends is why something will sell. If you’re making clothing and you aren’t hip to this year’s styles and colors, no one is going to buy your stuff, is the sentiment I presume. It can easily become overwhelmingly about conforming to trends. Designers also tend to put famous people and sources of influence on pedestals and think they will never be 1/10 of the genius of, say, the person who decided that some famous building should look like a pile of mashed potatoes, or that an Apple billboard should just be black text centered on a plain white background. In art, as in philosophy, there is so much pressure to agree that certain people are good, regardless of any objectivity or lay opinions—so much focus on status—that to even think of what you are doing as potentially-good-in-others’-eyes, you need to copy someone or some brand with high status, or somehow attain your own status, is how I think people sometimes feel.

In other words, designers of UIs might falsely think the customer cares about trends and fads, and that their work will be evaluated through a system of reference points and status divorced from actual merit, as can happen in the design world and adjacent spheres (art, fashion, etc).