I’ve found myself developing a design mantra of Less Is More on pretty much every level of user experience work – the amount of content or functionality presented on screen, the embellishments in a design, the complexity of animation, the message conveyed by creative, the language in the copy, the steps you have to work through, … etc.
Unfortunately delivering on Less Is More takes a lot of effort, and most people want to go the easy route of adding more. Usually that seems to be because the more you have, the more there is to please all comers and cover your bases. However it has been proven through research that customers want less choices which are better targeted at them, and this signal-to-noise issue seems to work on all levels.
The other reason I’ve noticed people avoid less-is-more is that when you strip away the extras, you’ll notice that all that stuff was hiding flaws in the basic quality of what you were creating. Now the rough edges on the essential features come leaping out, and it’s evident that you need to put more effort into smoothing them and finessing them.
It’s this combination of stripping down to the good stuff, and then working on the finesse of the solution, that really delivers great UX design. You can see this in the iPhone and other successes of Apple design where they’ve kept it minimal and concentrated on the polish and sophistication… and ultimately what delights people about the experience.
Filed under: creative delivery, style
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