@go12 @bw-admin Thank you for listening. Although I have already made my opinion known, I wanted to provide an additional observation to explain a UX problem that has emerged as a result of the visual design changes:
Extraneous Padding Interferes with Perception of Grouped Elements
As I was doing some Christmas shopping yesterday, I was frequently accessing the credit card and identity items on the “Tab” page. I noticed that when doing this rapidly, I could no longer identify the card and identity items I was seeking at-a-glance (without thinking), but I had to take a second to inspect the “Tab” page before I could locate the correct item to click. Since I have some experience with technical communication theory, I realized quickly what had happened: I was no longer using pre-attentive visual processing to find the desired item, but I had to invoke slower cognitive processes to interpret the relationships between the pieces of information on the screen.
On inspection, the culprit is the excessive padding and internal margins for boxed items, which greatly increases the spacing between elements that belong to the same group. This is breaking the Gestalt principle of Proximity, which allows the brain to perceive objects as belonging to the same group if they are in close proximity.
Specifically, it is now now no longer possible to use this pre-attentive attribute to immediately recognize the groupings for Logins, Cards, and Identities on the “Tab” page. The separation between items belonging to the same group has increased by 56%, while the separation between groups has increased by only 32%. When attempting to interpret the page contents at a glance, the brain no longer perceives distinct groupings — instead, it looks like one continuous list (with somewhat uneven spacing). Thus, one now has to look for the group headings (“Logins”, “Cards”, “Identities”) or pay attention to the subtle differences in spacing.
To fix this, and make a more usable UI, you either need to make a larger difference in the within-group and between-group spacings, or you need to use other Gestalt principles to allow the brain to perceive the page structure pre-attentively — for example, the Similarity principle (e.g., use different font colors for each group) or the Common Region principle (e.g., draw a bounding box around each group).
Of course, the easiest solution is to revert the excessive increases in box margins and padding.
