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zoebourque
zoebourque

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What do you think of minimalist UI?

There is a lot of software that claims to have the "minimalist UI", but they just end up to hide most of the features to show that their interface is minimalist and the software is simple.

The key to minimalism isn’t making the interface simple per se. It’s about making it as simple as it needs to be.

There are some of the software with the minimalist interface that actually work.

  1. Instagram

Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms now. Last year, after they underwent the design change, the user experience got so much smoother and easier.

Now when you scroll your newsfeed on Instagram, you will focus on the content uploaded rather than other clutters in design.

  1. Medium

If you blog everyday, you must know about Medium. One of the best thing with Medium is, you can actually focus on your readings rather than the fancy design or colorful photos that can easily distract you.

Most recently redesigned last October, the Medium app lets you personalise what kind of blog posts you receive in your feed, and offers a selection of ‘Top Stories’ and 'Editors’ picks' on its homepage. But where it really comes into its own is in the reading experience, which is elegantly and artfully designed for relaxed and enjoyable reading.

  1. Pinterest

Pinterest is a great source of beautiful and inspirational photos for you. They have photos to set up as cards. You can create organization and flow in a design. Cards also rely on established user behavior patterns, making UI easy to use.

Every element lives in a container that relates to a specific action, such as activating a link, filing out a form, or sharing the link.

Besides from all of the famous apps, I personally have some SaaS platform with the award-winning UI. For example, for productivity apps, we have Quire and Notion.

What's your favorite app?

Top comments (28)

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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic

Pure bliss:
term

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schaan profile image
Schaan Alq.

Ah it's perfectly vertically centralized on the golden ratio! That is definitely not minimal and already sophisticated!

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ottowakarimasen profile image
otto-wakarimasen

In my humble opinion 'minimalistic' is not equal to 'ascetic'.

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡

Ascetic is the general case.

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ottowakarimasen profile image
otto-wakarimasen

Historically minimalism has been heralded by poor Japanese, so yes, in the general case it is ascetic. But nowadays it also includes a bit of minimum comfortability with some possible unnecessary improvements, IMHO.

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harryphillips profile image
Harry Phillips

Forgot to power off/on again to reset your hacking attempts!

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀 • Edited

Oooo look at those scan lines 😇

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jingxue profile image
Jing Xue

Well, I'd like to nominate dev.to. Especially on the phone, its simplicity is quite pleasing and actually makes me want to keep coming back and reading.

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lazerg profile image
Lazizbek Ergashev

Me too. I've always come here even I don't want to read. Because it's minimalistic design makes it more attractive

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technolaaji profile image
Mohamad Kalaaji

I've worked with several designers for the past years and always end with fights: they overcomplicate the design of the site/app for the user and for us developers

so I redid some of the design elements in Sketch and send it to them, the answer: they get pissed because someone who isn't a designer telling them what to do, what we do at the end: choose my designs because they are easier to approach and more minimal

but minimal and simplistic designs/UIs are not easy, and you might remove some functionalities for the sake of the simple UI but the question is: Do you really need those settings?

you have to make the design approachable to everyone whether they are technical or non technical, and when things get easier for the user to do then the user will get hooked into the platform

there is a book called "Hooked" by Nir Eyal (goodreads.com/book/show/22668729-h...) that tackle this point: simple design can lead users to get hooked to a platform

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johannesvollmer profile image
Johannes Vollmer • Edited

Well, I feel like those designers were just exceptionally bad, because usually the Designers ask the programmers to remove the irrelevant features.

All design aims to be simple. The perfect UI is a big button which days "do it" and when you press it, the app does the thing you want. Sadly, computers are not that smart yet 😅

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mkilmer profile image
MKilmer • Edited

As you mentioned, something minimalistic doesn't mean taking away a lot of features, but just using the features that are really needed. So I really like Google Keep, because everything is straight to the point, so you don't get distracted by things unnecessary.

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

Been using keep for ages, is my main note taking app, checklist app, planning, etc. Is just great. I love it so much that I'm thinking about making a clone given that Google likes to kills services from time to time.

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cwhyter profile image
claire.whyter

I used to love Medium. They have the best layout ever, I can really focus on finding a piece of article that I love. But now they've changed their layout recently (or not recently) and things look a bit cluttered. But still, Medium is one of the best blogging platform ever.

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

Every time I go to a medium post it contains a huge unscrollable banner on top, and a footer too leaving the reading area small. If I really want to read it I go into developer tools and delete those components. I could write a monkey script but many medium blogs point to other urls so is hard to implement.

I use pinterest on mobile and they had made some big changes but overall last android app update is pretty cool.

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heyrohit profile image
Rohit Gupta

Well made minimal ui are pure delight.

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kmwill23 profile image
Kevin

The trick is starting minimalist, and then staying minimalist in a rapidly changing and expanding application.

I personally feel that having a minimal UI in a complex environment still counts. Your UI can focus on that user's personal workflow based on their role. If they want more power, they can tailor that view. So I do in fact hide things to keep the guise of minimalist.

This is in an Enterprise environment though, so different design needs than a Pinterest etc.

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afflecklogan profile image
Logan Affleck

I believe that there is no such thing as minimal UI. Anything that distracts, lacks function, conflicts with the design, or obstructs a user is simply BAD UI. Sure, you can make your app vapid with white space, but that doesn't really equate to a minimal experience. Instagram and Pinterest possess a great deal of visual garbage and user-unfriendly design (and usually on purpose).

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

I feel. like medium was such of poor example for ui minimalism, unless is the mobile app but I don't use it so I wouldn't know but the site is not minimalist whatsoever.

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joelvarty profile image
Joel Varty

If the UI is content-driven, I'm a lot more forgiving as an end-user. Just give me a decent recent experience without distractions and I'll consume that content voraciously.

If the UI is meant to be functional - if I'm using it, it needs to have a lot more UX engineering put into it, and it needs to balance the idea of being fresh with keeping things consistent over time.

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guneyozsan profile image
Guney Ozsan

I should add that minimalizm should be accompanied with speed. A minimalist interface means nothing if it is not instant. I mean, if you make me wait so long, then give me more or just stop it. Recently some of my favorite minimal products became so slow to be useful. Windows opens faster than Gmail and Facebook, which is insane for text content. On the other side, Dev.to is a very good mention I saw in an above comment that matches speed and minimalism in such a cool way.

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

You lost me at 'Medium'

I'm not entirely dismissing your point though, it's just all the popups and the ads while trying to focus on what I'm reading

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡 • Edited

There's a difference between the Morlocks and Eloi at the keyboard.

A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun.

Minimalist UI does not always mean minimalist UX.

If the UI achieves its minimalism by making me click more, I'm out. OUT I say!

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mehdiraash profile image
Mehdi Raash

I presume the 'new twitter web app' is wonderful, linkedin needs a lot of changes to become more easy...
see? It's about the app's use case, the Instagram itself is all about pictures, twitter is all about twits, so they just offer their only-one-thing and then hide other things, thus this is an opinion about designing.

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guneyozsan profile image
Guney Ozsan • Edited

Instagram was like that but it is becoming more Facebook everyday featurewise. Unfortunately better profit generating UI is not the most user friendly one.

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integerman profile image
Matt Eland

I can't take anything seriously without a dark theme. Angular Material Dark is good in my book and is fairly minimal.