Presented are various examples of web form and table design, both simple and information dense. Each serves the needs of the specific use case underlying the design.
Card Based Display and Creation
This now popular approach to display objects as cards in a grid worked well for this workstream task overview.
Simple object creation
This minimalist design allows users to easily create tasks by typing the task title and pressing enter. This rapid approach to creating tasks with just the essential information mapped well onto user's mental models, such as todo lists and reminders.
This info dense table went through a series of iterations, finally arriving at the design pictured here. As noted, actions were surfaced as buttons repeated in each row. Although more visually heavy, this was deemed an acceptable trade-off because of the clear affordances provided.
Although some evidence has suggested that users sometimes overlook secondary columns in web forms, examples like this minimalist design test quite well. The difference is the use case—in repeated data entry use cases, such as this form for entering doctor data, the reduction in scrolling and clean organization of grouped sections, allows for an improved data entry experience (over a single column approach.)