It's not just information density but rather intended use design. A lot of engineering/manufacturing parts suppliers tend to have good information dense websites that are really catered to their customers for finding parts.
Take mouser.com, digikey.com, grainger.com rockauto.com or mcmaster.com. They all have a bit of a "landing page" but once you go to search for parts you've got something that was really designed to be an intuitive parts search. Compare that with jameco.com which competes with mouser/digikey but has a more classic webshop search system. It’s a bit more frustrating to use.
Some news sites also do a great job of presenting headlines and highlights well in a small area. I think semafor.com is probably my current favorite, but I'll readily admit that it's not the most information dense.
CAD software also tends to be good at this, but that might be just because the UI has chugged along since the 90's. AutoCAD/Inventor/Solidworks/SolidEdge/KiCAD/Altium/Virtuoso are all great examples where if you've got prior experience with them (or even similar software) you can sit down and quickly get up to speed on a project and see what's been done. I think the distinction is that a lot of software/websites are designed to keep the average user focused on a single aspect and so they are designed to either remove or hide the complexity but for more “professional” level tools you need all that data and information. You can probably blame (for better or for worse) material UI for a lot of this spaced-out thing. In my mind that was the first mobile first UI scheme that really took off and it's basically influenced everything that's come sense then. Computer first software might be your best bet to get some examples. Because a lot of the web is mobile first/mobile forward now you probably aren't going to find a lot of examples on that. I would love to see examples of information dense mobile first sites.
A few other examples I just wanted to brain dump:
- labgopher.com
- tld-list.com
- The Bloomberg Terminal
- Ghidra
- Most plane cockpits, especially modern fighter planes if you ever get to see/sit on one.
- A lot of “professional level creative software” – Reaper, Affinity
Take mouser.com, digikey.com, grainger.com rockauto.com or mcmaster.com. They all have a bit of a "landing page" but once you go to search for parts you've got something that was really designed to be an intuitive parts search. Compare that with jameco.com which competes with mouser/digikey but has a more classic webshop search system. It’s a bit more frustrating to use.
Some news sites also do a great job of presenting headlines and highlights well in a small area. I think semafor.com is probably my current favorite, but I'll readily admit that it's not the most information dense.
CAD software also tends to be good at this, but that might be just because the UI has chugged along since the 90's. AutoCAD/Inventor/Solidworks/SolidEdge/KiCAD/Altium/Virtuoso are all great examples where if you've got prior experience with them (or even similar software) you can sit down and quickly get up to speed on a project and see what's been done. I think the distinction is that a lot of software/websites are designed to keep the average user focused on a single aspect and so they are designed to either remove or hide the complexity but for more “professional” level tools you need all that data and information. You can probably blame (for better or for worse) material UI for a lot of this spaced-out thing. In my mind that was the first mobile first UI scheme that really took off and it's basically influenced everything that's come sense then. Computer first software might be your best bet to get some examples. Because a lot of the web is mobile first/mobile forward now you probably aren't going to find a lot of examples on that. I would love to see examples of information dense mobile first sites.
A few other examples I just wanted to brain dump:
- labgopher.com
- tld-list.com
- The Bloomberg Terminal
- Ghidra
- Most plane cockpits, especially modern fighter planes if you ever get to see/sit on one.
- A lot of “professional level creative software” – Reaper, Affinity
- Train control and monitoring systems