Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much.
At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped.
Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells.
Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10.
The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.
At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped.
Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells.
Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10.
The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.