alt Hacker News> too busy, you have to look for information
Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
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None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal.
A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.