You are thinking about this from a end-user perspective, not a power user. It's the difference between eToro and Active Trader Pro. Or Fidelity's own app and their Active Trader Pro. There's is no right and wrong, they just target different audiences with different priorities.
That's why we like btop and htop, but a normal PC user wouldn't understand anything.
I'm not familiar with the UI of financial software, sorry. But can I ask what a power user in your example would be looking for in a screen like this? Like are they watching the screen for movement, color, ordering, something else...?
The most similar things I've worked on were dashboards and spreadsheets, but in those cases, we put a lot of thought into information hierarchy and organization, not just flat density.
For example, we'd hide what we could behind traffic status lights ; if all systems were green, you're good, and you'd only need to dig deeper into ones outside the norm that were yellow or red.
Or where the metric itself is important and shouldn't be hidden, we'd still try to highlight changes over time with sparklines or conditional color scales.
Basically just try to guide the report viewer's attention towards the most important things, whether it's "this is broken!" or "whoa, this number changed a lot over the last 24 hours".
Even in a spreadsheet, there'd be sparklines and cell formatting and subtotals and totals and such to highlight the important stuff.
I can't think of a situation where I'd want to see a bunch of peer numbers like this with no hierarchy. I'm not really comparing them against each other, am I, but probably trying to see change over time...?
But anyway, I honestly don't know (and am curious about) how this works in the financial sector. Are traders really just manually looking at all these numbers all the time (and doing what with them, trying to remember what they were some time ago?)?
This complexity also shows in 3d software. I love all these UIs like 3dmax, SoftImage (!), Blender, Lightwave. Creating 3d has so many aspects to it and it shows in complexity of these UIs.
Generally speaking, I much prefer being able to click one of many things shown on the screen than clicking through endless sub-menus, which was always a waste of time for me.
It's an interesting question (how much density is "right" for productivity apps).
On one hand, I still hate the MS Office "ribbon" UI to this day and much prefer the denser and more compact Google Docs or even Open Office layout.
On the other hand, Sketchup was hugely popular and very easy to use compared to its peers when it was released, and quickly became the de facto tool for simple free basic 3d modeling, in no small part because of easy and clean it was, I think. But they got bought out and then abandoned, I think? It doesn't have anywhere near the power of the other software anyway.
IDEs are another example. VScode seems a lot cleaner and leaner than old IDEs, and Jetbrains ended up copying them too (a controversial change, of course).
Photoshop is the one that always gets me. Twenty years of using it and I still can't get used to its layout. It's just so many different weird widget types mashed together in a way you don't see in any other software. I much prefer a docked toolbar like in Figma or Paint Shop Pro. I hate that I use it... I feel like a hostage every time I open it.
> It's an interesting question (how much density is "right" for productivity apps).
Between extremes of GUI presenting all functions at once and accessing all functions through memorized keyboard shortcuts, there must lay large lands of possible, experimental GUIs which unfortunately never get tested in popular software (which defaults to sub-menus + some keyboard access). I mean zoomable UIs, radial menus, 3d concepts in UIs,... - it's hard to see any of research on experimental interfaces make way into actual everyday-use apps.
Every standard GUI element could be thought over. Once I worked with some standard accounting software, where I needed to select some stuff many times during the day from a dropdown. I quickly learnt how to move content from a dropdown menus into a spreadsheet with some formulas which allowed me to paste selection I needed back into these dropdowns 10 times faster. When I was leaving this temp gig I showed this solution to some guy in accounting, whose life was basically opening these dropdowns all day long. Regardless that he was really mean guy, I showed him the trick. He almost had tears in his eyes seeing it. I am not counting muscles strain avoided... Multiply by thousands of users everyday...
Not to mention trying to integrate interoperability of apps within the OS (e.g. to have one program to check for spelling in all apps, across the OS - I cant remember name of one such fine try (ages before)).
As per PS, have you ever tried to really personalize PS UI to your liking? I remember friends getting really opinionated on positioning all those menus perfectly for themselves (and for a reason). Personally I feel like PS is very intuitive for me, whereas in similar apps I cant do simple things, but it's probably because I was kindly shown around.
> I was leaving this temp gig I showed this solution to some guy in accounting, whose life was basically opening these dropdowns all day long.
Lol, that is such a tragic story that must happen millions of times across the world today. At a previous job, one department was spending 3-4 hours a day manually copying & pasting customer contacts from emails into their CRM. This was in an org with tens of developers, but nothing was done about it for years until my manager happened to catch wind of it and asked me to take a look in my spare time. I wrote an integration in a few hours and those ~40 lines of code have probably saved thousands of hours and dollars by now.
As programmers, we're allergic to manual repetition, but so much of the world runs on that...
> As per PS, have you ever tried to really personalize PS UI to your liking?
When I was young, I used to spend hours doing that, iterating on PS UI configurations, testing them, rearranging and retesting... these days I'm just too old and curmudgeonly to do anything about it except whine, lol. But you're right, I should probably just bite the bullet and do that once and sync it to my account.
That's why we like btop and htop, but a normal PC user wouldn't understand anything.