Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Domains with naturally high-density UIs

  • Finance/trading: Bloomberg Terminal, TradingView, thinkorswim, Interactive Brokers’ TWS and mobile app, crypto exchanges like BitMEX. Users highlight fast access to many instruments, Greeks, order books, multi‑leg strategies, and linkable widgets as exemplary dense-but-usable designs. Some, however, find Bloomberg unreadable without long-term immersion.
  • Professional tools: ECAD/PCB (KiCAD, Altium, OrCAD, etc.), CAD/3D (Blender, Rhino, AutoCAD, Inventor, SolidWorks), profiling/tracing tools (Tracy, RenderDoc, Perfetto, Windows Performance Analyzer), dev tools (Chrome DevTools, JetBrains, VSCode), EMRs and clinic software, SCADA/PLC HMIs, rover operations tools at JPL. Often praised by experts, but frequently overwhelming or “terrible” to newcomers.

Websites and catalogs

  • Parts & e‑commerce: McMaster‑Carr is repeatedly cited as a gold standard: fast, consistent, highly structured, brand‑agnostic, with carefully pruned detail. RockAuto, Mouser, DigiKey, RS, SDP‑SI, diskprices.com, tld‑list.com, labgopher.com get similar praise. Some prefer DigiKey/Mouser’s filter/apply model over McMaster’s auto-updating filters.
  • News & weather: Japanese and Chinese portals, Bloomberg, FT, Ars Technica list view, NOAA weather, Weather Underground, Weatherspark, and custom RSS/portal setups (Netvibes, news dashboards) are cited as dense headline/forecast views.
  • Social/aggregators: old Reddit + RES, HN itself, custom HN frontends (hcker.news, commentcastles, hnr.app), and various link dashboards (start.me, sciurls/techurls/skimfeed).

Professional creative and game UIs

  • DAWs (Ableton Live, Logic, Reaper, Ardour, Renoise, Mixxx), audio plugins, video/VFX suites (After Effects, Flame, NLEs), photo tools, and game UIs (EVE Online, WoW raid frames, clickers) are seen as good models: very dense, panel-based, keyboard-friendly, configurable. People note steep learning curves but high long-term efficiency.

Design philosophy & trends

  • Strong sentiment that “dense UIs are for experts”: doctors, traders, engineers, admins, and creatives want everything on one screen and will trade initial confusion for speed.
  • Contrast drawn with modern “Tailwind/Material/VC UI” aesthetics: big tap targets, heavy whitespace, and ad/engagement goals seen as hurting productivity.
  • Some recommend Tufte and Bret Victor for information design; others argue Tufte’s ideas don’t translate cleanly to complex, interactive tools.
  • Several note “information appropriate” is a better goal than maximal density: dense for survey/overview; focused, low-clutter views for detailed reading or single tasks.