Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
The eighth of the ten usability heuristics of Jacob Nielsen states
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility
Concepts
One of the key underlying concepts of this heuristic is the limited capacity and absorption ability of the human brain in processing information. Several theories in IS and in general in academic research address this topic. One main example would be the Information Processing Theory. Since already several decades, Miller presented the idea of chunks and of short-term memory, which would be able to process only 5+-2 chunks of information.
Concrete applications of this heuristics could be summarized as
show only what the user needs
Shorting this a little bit more, it would be “less is more”. With all these taglines we want to focus on determining what and how the information should be visualized. Meaning with information all the visual elements of the interface, from buttons to text.
Talking about what to visualize would essentially mean to take care about avoiding cluttering the users with extra and irrelevant information they might not need by keeping a clean interface that can catch and retain the user attention. However, there is not a black & white approach to determine what is really relevant and what is not. As a matter of fact, there are degrees of relevance. This implies the need for a prioritization of the information and actions shown. Strategies as progressive disclosure are providing solutions to this problem.
At this point comes in place the how. Eventually, the information should not only be visualized with appropriate styles, but also the location on the interface plays a critical role. The devices we have to deal with come with constraints in size, so the importance to be aware of how to arrange elements and interactions. We should try taking advantage of what nowadays users are already experiencing. For example, having a vertical layout means to have the first section, as big as the size of the screen, which will have a higher priority compared to the rest of the view, since to access the rest of the page the user has to go through another interaction first. This is called above the fold and more details can be found in many specialized UX blogs. Other aspects to take care of are the noise of too many information items. Or having many items pointing the same action and creating redundancy on the page. Finally another aspect is to take care about the functionality and what each item represents and should be triggering. All these aspects are strictly related to the users habits.
Examples
One of the main extreme example provided by most of the online learning material takes into account the Google homepage, where mainly we have only the search bar and really few more possible interactions.
Here we can see two examples of websites taken from Webdesign-Inspiration. A platform that gathers well-designed websites as a portfolio.
In the first example, the Hype website, we can see how the page is structured with a vertical layout. Notice the scrollbar on the side. Being a landing page, the core elements provided are the logo, the menu and the call-to-actions. More detailed information have been hidden, so the user can quickly understand the purpose of the website. Moreover, by playing with the colors and contrasts, the attention is driven to a specific call-to-action.
In the second screenshot we see, instead, a landing page with a fullwidth layout. No scrollbars. So all the possible interaction with this page are already accessible and visible to the user at the first load of the interface.
Finally, we should take care of the evolutionary aspect of the user experience. Therefore all the examples provided in this article might be already obsolete at this time.
