Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful. All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption.
My work email rarely exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of all my other work emails.
The ability to actually cross reference and get work done quickly should always trump aesthetics. These modern “spaced out” UIs are infuriating, they achieve nothing other than requiring more scrolling.
> Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful.
Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can with multiple emails open in separate windows or monitors.
Admittedly depending on the amount of emails and the speed at which you work through them you might benefit from seeing many at once, though there's other ways of dealing with that issue.
> All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption.
I don't think whitespace is all about aesthetics. Personally, it makes it easier for me to read and focus on things. It gives individual things more value, rather than them being "just another thing in a gigantic list", easily blending in and showing no significance.
> Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can with multiple emails open in separate windows or monitors.
Do you inspect your store's inventory by having one page per SKU or do you get a listing with each SKU summarised into its title?
I think the distinction here is really that some people (myself included) deal with so much email, that they need tools to deal with it in bulk, and others in this thread apparently do not. Maybe they're dealing with emails one by one as they come in, maybe they just don't get that much email.
Spacing is useful for me because it helps each individual piece of text stand out from the others. Too dense and it all looks like a jumble to me that I can't easily scan visually. Too much whitespace I agree is bad for the reasons you described. But everyone has different taste here. The ideal scenario is an option to change spacing.
My work email rarely exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of all my other work emails.
The ability to actually cross reference and get work done quickly should always trump aesthetics. These modern “spaced out” UIs are infuriating, they achieve nothing other than requiring more scrolling.