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> 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the pr

> 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the problem. A minimalistic UI isn't automatically more or less powerful than a complex one if it combines well with other tools. To make every part combine well with the other parts to get out more than the sum of the parts is worth it, but find the right degree of minimalism vs complexity. It doesn't have to be sleak but minimalist ! = sleak. A UX designer makes things minimalist while a UI designer makes them sleak. A minimalist UI is a strong sign that care was put into abstracting away unnecessary and complex features that most users do not need - which is the job of a UX designer.

Tainnor 6y ago
I think this only works for certain classes of applications. Applications that professional users use do typically need lots of features, no matter how you present that. The idea of "most users don't need this" is misguided because while most of the functionality won't be necessary for most users, users don't necessarily agree on which features they will need, every one of them requiring a different subset of the features. Just take something like a sheet music composer (something like Sibelius, Finale or Dorico). There's no way in hell you can just strip out a significant chunk of the features because doing that would totally break the product for many, many users (incidentally, the YouTube channel tantacrul has some interesting videos about UX design in this space - not affiliated). Word processors, IDEs, etc. share similar fates. Frankly, I'm often annoyed when some programs pretend that I don't need some functionality and prefer to present their minimalist UI to me that doesn't let me do advanced stuff. A lot of macOS software IMHO suffers from this problem which is maybe great if you just want a barebones e-mail reader, say, but then you get something like XCode which doesn't even have proper refactoring support because "look at how complicated IntelliJ is".

Tainnor 6y ago

I think this only works for certain classes of applications. Applications that professional users use do typically need lots of features, no matter how you present that. The idea of "most users don't need this" is misguided because while most of the functionality won't be necessary for most users, users don't necessarily agree on which features they will need, every one of them requiring a different subset of the features. Just take something like a sheet music composer (something like Sibelius, Finale or Dorico). There's no way in hell you can just strip out a significant chunk of the features because doing that would totally break the product for many, many users (incidentally, the YouTube channel tantacrul has some interesting videos about UX design in this space - not affiliated). Word processors, IDEs, etc. share similar fates. Frankly, I'm often annoyed when some programs pretend that I don't need some functionality and prefer to present their minimalist UI to me that doesn't let me do advanced stuff. A lot of macOS software IMHO suffers from this problem which is maybe great if you just want a barebones e-mail reader, say, but then you get something like XCode which doesn't even have proper refactoring support because "look at how complicated IntelliJ is".