How to make a screen with tons of whitespace not look awkward

Question

In my settings page (above), I am currently using tabs to navigate between sections (Rake + tip, Hand rankings, Tiers...). For the insights section of the settings page, the only objective is to allow the users to show or hide the insights section of the app, which is shown in the pink box below.

For the other tabs in settings, I have save buttons. I chose to use save buttons due to the idea that without them, users may be confused about whether or not their changes actually got saved, and if they haven't, what they need to do to save them. I used NN Group's Don’t Prioritize Efficiency Over Expectations to come to this conclusion.

Given that I have save buttons in other tabs, it seems to me that not having it for this tab would introduce confusion.

The screen looks really awkward to me, and I'm having trouble putting my finger on why, or on what I can do to improve it.

One option is to make things bigger and perhaps more centered, but, at least in this case, it would be inconsistent with the rest of the settings, and I presume that in many other situations it would also introduce inconsistency.

And now to make the question more generally applicable: what are some general guidelines one can use for situations like this, where there is very little content and tons of whitespace?

Answer 1

Firstly, I do not recommend placing a save button just to be consistent. You will confuse your users - functionality over aesthetics. You can keep consistency without having a save button on each page.

Secondly, you should rethink the use scenario. To give you a hint, don't you think that if a user clicks on the insights tab they will want to be shown the insights? Furthermore, if they want to hide the insights then might they just move to another tab?

I'd recommend removing the show/hide checkbox altogether. Or depending on how the content looks you could add the show/hide insights to another tab. Either way its not standard practice to have a tab with hidden content.

Edit: Have you thought about putting the show/hide insights on each page and having it a universal function rather than tucked away in a lonely settings tab? It could just be placed in the corner in the space which the insights would appear from.

Answer 2

You might want to rethink your UI and place navigation on the left side of the screen, just to minimize the amount of space available, if you do not require it all in future. For the lack of data, it is considered good UX to inform user of that matter.

Examples:

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Answer 3

This looks like an Information Architecture issue, not a UI issue. I wonder if that Insights tab is even necessary, or if that setting can be absorbed into another tab?

If there's no easy place to put it, my advice would be to do a card sorting exercise. Take all of your settings and write them on notecards, then sort the notecards according to user task groupings. Reshuffle until you have useful settings groupings and there are your tabs. Chances are, you'll end up with something a lot like how you set up your navigation instinctively, but hopefully no orphan settings like you have here.