Design minimalism: aesthetic vs. function
How excessively stripping back your product design will render most features useless and, ultimately, waste resources and space.
“If you can’t make something self-evident, you at least need to make it self-explanatory.” “The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them — at least not until after repeated attempts at “muddling through” have failed.” “Keep it simple, so you’ll keep doing it.”
— Steve Krug
“Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug was one of the first reading materials recommended to me when I started as a Product Designer. The premise was as simple as the title of the book, designs work best when users don’t have to think, the quote chosen above is one of very many poignant tidbits analysing human psychology in relation to product interaction.
Forcing users into a corner where they need to spend time searching for instructions or trying to understand the intended functionality of some of your components will lead to a very frustrated user base. Or even worse — they won’t use your product again, and tell other people not to either.
That’s simple enough, and by and large, most products where users have more freedom of choice keep this in mind because retention is everything; however, those aren’t the only types of digital products and the ones where users tend to have less flexibility often take the most design hits.
The way I see it, digital products typically fall into three buckets where users are concerned;
- The type they have to use as part of their job - These are primarily SaaS (Software as a Service) products employees use on a day-to-day basis. There is less user sway in these, rather than one user having the power to simply stop using a product and telling others not to, their employer is usually tied into a lengthy contract meaning use is almost all but guaranteed. Products where you can do everything from claim expenses, organise meetings or track client projects and other job-critical work fall into this category.
- The products they need to use for personal objectives - These are a bit of a mix between Have and Want, users are a bit more flexible in choosing what to use and what not to therefore the personal choice/preference is slightly greater. However, given the limited options and the ever-increasing benefit of performing tasks online, aspects such as emailing, mobile banking and travel booking have become a need.
- Products they want to use for personal/social gain - Mainly used for pleasure (with some purpose), these products either need to be bridging a glaring gap in the market, or designed incredibly well to not only attract users but retain them as well. These tend to be mobile apps, typically social media, where retention is particularly difficult. Research states that the average retention rate across 31 mobile app categories was 25.3% on Day 1, before falling to 5.7% by Day 30 (Mobile App Retention, Nayden Tafradzhiyski, 2023).
You do get the odd ‘Want’ product that borderline becomes a ‘Need’, i.e. social media sites becoming addictive. Some can even become a ‘Have to’ in the case of full-time content creators, but they make up a smaller percentage of the user base.
I’ve illustrated these in the (quickly hacked together) graphic below, coined ‘The Product Trinity’:
A number of SaaS products tend to tow the line when it comes to design, which in itself is ironic because they’re meant to provide a service. Due to factors such as large market share or ‘sticky’ contractual agreements, design usually isn’t at the forefront of strategy — tradeoffs are bolder and ultimately the user voice becomes a complaint/ticket rather than an integral part of building usable solutions.
This is the bucket I’d especially like to focus on. Complicated function should not be pasted over by presumptuous aesthetic, particularly for products that users have little choice using as part of their already stressful day job.
If users don’t know what a component does, what’s the point in it?
While wireframing a new product or layout, I’d often asked myself “Do Icons need accompanying text?”. A simple search on NNGroup would give a very clear ‘yes’, stating “Universal icons are rare. To help overcome the ambiguity that almost all icons face, a text label must be present alongside an icon to clarify its meaning.” But, being a new designer, it’s really easy to get stuck in the monkey-see-monkey-do approach of designing. The majority of your learning will be grinding it out in your day-to-day job, you’ll likely find yourself either asking questions of more experienced designers around you, or even following their style.
There’s nothing wrong with that for the most part; it’s just that in as much as you pick up the good habits, you pick up the bad ones too. And when you don’t have a wealth of experience to back you or years in theoretic education on design heuristics to challenge some of their designs, you won’t immediately know what’s right and wrong. Also, more often than not — something can visually look good to an untrained eye, but when you drill into the functionality, you often see that none really exists.
I was carrying out some user research earlier this year, part of the purpose of this was establishing and validating user pain points, establishing accurate journey maps and ultimately improving the usability of a product. One particular area which raised some concern was the use and the design of a toolbar in the product. The bar contained several icons, only a couple of which were incredibly obvious as to their functionality. As a result, users simply stopped using the icons as they didn’t know what they did and couldn’t easily figure it out without risking an error on live data.
This was a shame, not only because I am sure considerable time, effort and resource went into designing and building the bar but also because a lot of the features contained in the tools were actually very useful ‘hacks’.
What was intended as something to make someone’s job easier instead just became ignored and visual noise, forcing users to think more than they probably wanted to in order to complete a task and as a result, they checked out of the process entirely. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the first things we addressed, actually taking inspiration from the approach of a ‘Have to’ product doing it right which is Microsoft Teams:
As you can see above, Teams accompany their in-call icons with supportive text. This wasn’t always the case though, earlier releases just had the icons and I’m sure we’ve all been on a call when someone has had to try to help a fellow user on the call navigate to a certain tool, “You see the arrow in the box on the right? Yeah, that one — that’s to share, click that, and we can see your screen.” However, with this tweak, just like that, users were allowed to think less and stop guessing, and even the more obvious icons were supported with text for consistency and to maintain the utmost clarity.
Concern raised around this is often that “there’s not enough space” or “it makes the design look crowded”, but as uncovered in my user research, unless the purpose of the icon is universal and painstakingly obvious, your users simply won’t know what it is and stop using it.
Yeah, but that’s what tooltips are for…right?
Not necessarily, tooltips are meant to support — not inform. They should be supplementary to design and should not take the place of an action title. Apart from the fact that users are forced to do more (think more) to uncover purpose, they’re also inaccessible. As WCAG picks up speed, more light is shining on inaccessible designs, and rightly so. Here are just a few groups of people that won’t be able to access your icon info if you rely on tooltips as titles/labels:
- People using touchscreen devices
- Blind/low-vision users will likely not know the tooltip is even there
- Keyboard users
- Users that require eye-tracking software
I think WCAG will eventually be to Design what GDPR is to Data and information. Digital products should be accessible to all and it is best practise to design with accessibility in mind right from conception, not as a legal tickbox but because it is the right thing to do.
There really is no adequate replacement for labelling icons, it’s in our best interest as designers to ensure our designs are not only functional but also useful. You’re better placed shifting your design around a bit as long as it is in the interest of usability and accessibility. I’ll tie this back to the Product Trinity mentioned earlier, just because users have to use a product it shouldn’t come at the cost of functionality. It’s a bit easy to become complacent more open to making bolder tradeoffs as choice is less but user frustration will grow and it won’t affect just one of them, the ripple effect will spread.
Final thoughts
Minimalism is great in certain areas of life, but very rarely does it work as well in Product. That’s unless you’re a certain Steve Jobs, who is one of the forefathers of digital minimalism. At a time when mobile phones were heavily laden with buttons, he made a bold call to get rid of all of them except for one when Apple released the iPhone. The design wasn’t necessarily informed by the norm at the time or the general market environment.
Every other competitor still relied on phones with buttons — some even adding the entire QWERTY keyboard to their devices, if anything the industry was heading towards more buttons, not less!
But not every product is an iPhone, they were able to fix a problem or an annoyance users didn’t even know they had yet. As a result, Apple and the iPhone changed the world and rather than change their product to adapt to users, they led and the users followed.
I’ve said before, self-awareness is key, not just as an individual designer but also regarding the products which we work on. It is easy to become attached to your designs and even take some constructive feedback personally, but just because the aesthetic visually flows and looks good that doesn’t always translate to good function.
User research and feedback remains key, if something immediately makes sense to you as the designer of the tooltip/icon, it can’t be assumed the same meaning will resonate with the user. Less isn’t always more.
References
Krug, Steve. (2014). Don’t Make Me Think. 3rd ed. San Francisco, California: Pearson Education.
Andrea Kuska. (2022). How Bad Product Design Services Can Cost Your Company a Fortune in Fees. [Online]. cad crowd. Last Updated: 2 Feb 2022. Available at: https://www.cadcrowd.com/blog/how-bad-product-design-services-can-cost-your-company-a-fortune/.
Nayden Tafradzhiyski. (2023). Mobile App Retention. [Online]. Business of Apps. Last Updated: 6 Feb 2023. Available at: https://www.businessofapps.com/guide/mobile-app-retention/#:~:text=a%20worthwhile%20read.-,Mobile%20.
Caroline Forsey. (2022). If Everyone is a Content Creator — Is Anyone? [Data + Expert Insights]. [Online]. Hubspot. Last Updated: 14 June 2022. Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/everyone-is-a-content-creator.
Sarah Higley. (2019). Tooltips in the time of WCAG 2.1. [Online]. Sarah M Higley. Last Updated: 17 August 2019. Available at: https://sarahmhigley.com/writing/tooltips-in-wcag-21/.
Shawn Lawton Henry. (2005). WCAG 2 Overview. [Online]. W3 Web Accessibility Initiative. Last Updated: 25 Jan 2023. Available at: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/#:~:text=Web%20Content%20Accessibility%20Guidelines [Accessed 21 March 2023].
I use my page to write about my experiences working within Product Design, things I wish I heard myself when I first started. For more info, contact me on LinkedIn.
