> I'm curious why you think it reduces design costs to put less information on the screen?
The question is for whom it saves costs? For the developers of UI framework it certainly saves cost to treat the desktop as a second rate platform and to focus just on mobile.
Developers of desktop applications have to pay the price, by working around libraries and frameworks that do not consider them as a first tier clients.
I've been a designer for a long time, and none of my contracts have ever paid based on the number of things I put on the screen. The design effort required to make a grid or list of data dense or sparse is pretty much identical.
(At least in enterprise software the data density typically depends on who makes the purchasing decisions. If novices and/or business folks are the ones making the pick then the software will look sparse. If technical and/or experts pick their own tools then it'll be dense and efficient.)
The question is for whom it saves costs? For the developers of UI framework it certainly saves cost to treat the desktop as a second rate platform and to focus just on mobile.
Developers of desktop applications have to pay the price, by working around libraries and frameworks that do not consider them as a first tier clients.