How do you keep something powerful approachable?

Every few years somebody shows me a redesign of a professional tool where the main achievement is that there's less on the screen.

It photographs beautifully. It also goes down badly with the people who use the thing for eight hours a day, and I don't think nostalgia is the reason.

I spent six years on Eikon at Thomson Reuters, designing across desktop, tablets and wearables. The people I designed for read a financial terminal the way the rest of us read a sentence.

The screen was crowded by any magazine standard. It was also the most fluent interface I've worked on, because the density was doing work. It was there for the person who is still at the desk at four in the afternoon.

Everything visible at once is something the user doesn't have to remember, look for or navigate to. Take it off the screen and it doesn't disappear. It moves into the person's head, or into a click they now make four hundred times a day.

Nobody states that trade when they present the cleaner version. We moved the complexity from a place where it costs pixels to a place where it costs attention, on behalf of people who weren't in the room.

Several years of HR and talent software taught me the same lesson from the other direction. The systems that decide who gets hired, onboarded and promoted are enormously powerful, and the people who use them were given no training and have four other jobs.

Stripping those interfaces makes them mysterious, which is no kindness to anyone.

And in practice "simplify" almost always means hide. We put things behind a hover, a menu, a disclosure triangle, a modal, a second screen or an ellipsis nobody notices.

The information is still required, so now getting it depends on an interaction, and each of those costs somebody specific.

Hover excludes anyone on a touchscreen and anyone using a keyboard. A modal takes a person who was orienting themselves and moves them somewhere else.

Content behind an interaction is invisible to a person scanning a page with a screen reader, unless someone thought carefully about announcing it. Mostly nobody did.

So "we simplified it" often means "we made it harder to find, for everyone, and impossible to find, for some."

I'm not arguing for clutter. Removing something always costs somebody, and as a profession we have a habit of presenting it as if it cost nobody.

One observation changed how I think about all this. An expert reading a dense screen is navigating by position. They skip the label and go to the place where the number lives, which is real skill and worth designing for.

Now put that same screen in front of someone magnifying it four hundred percent, or someone on a phone between shifts. The layout rearranges, and every piece of positional knowledge they built is gone.

What they get is a different interface that nobody designed, made of the same parts in an order a stylesheet decided.

So making a dense tool humane and making it usable when rearranged turn out to be one question. Does the meaning survive being reordered?

If it does, the density is structural, and it will hold up for the expert, the newcomer and the person at four hundred percent. If it doesn't, the density was a picture, and it only ever worked for people who could see all of it at once.

I used to believe that approachable and powerful sit at opposite ends of one slider, and that our craft is choosing where to put it. I no longer think they're on the same axis.

A thing is approachable when its structure is legible, and we can design that into something dense. It becomes unapproachable when its structure is arbitrary, and a very clean screen can manage that too.

There are better questions than "can we simplify this?"

I start with what the person already knows. A recruiter who does this daily and a manager who does it twice a year need different products, and a change of theme doesn't cover the difference.

• What did we move, and to where? If it left the screen, name the place it went. That might be memory, a click, a second visit or a support call.
• Does each region stand on its own? A panel that only makes sense in its position stops making sense the moment anything reflows.
• What happens to the longest realistic value? Use the real one: a name in full, a job title from a hospital, a department that has been renamed twice.
• Who reads this on a phone, standing up, in bad light? In HR software the answer is most of the workforce, and it is almost never the person the mock was drawn for.

The next time a redesign arrives with less on it, ask where the missing parts went and who is carrying them now.

If nobody can answer, I'd treat it as a transfer, because somebody downstream is paying for it.