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Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs • Lea Verou

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Usability and aesthetics usually go hand in hand. In fact, there is even what we call the “Aesthetic Usability Effect”: users perceive beautiful interfaces as easier to use and cut them more slack when it comes to minor usabiity issues. Unfortunately, sometimes usability and aesthetics can be at odds, also known as “form over function”. A common incarnation of form-over-function, is when designers start identifying signifiers and affordances as noise to be eliminated, sacrificing a great deal of learnability for an — often marginal — improvement in aesthetics. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design is one of the Nielsen/Norman core usability heuristics (and all other heuristics taxonomies have something similar). More poetically, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. However, this is one of those cases where everyone agrees with the theory, but the devil is in the details (though user testing

Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs • Lea Verou On this page Simplicity, and knowing when to stop The ever-evolving vocabulary of user interaction UX Stockholm Syndrome Update: GitHub’s response (Nov 20th, 2023) Usability , UX , Design Usability and aesthetics usually go hand in hand. In fact, there is even what we call the “Aesthetic Usability Effect” : users perceive beautiful interfaces as easier to use and cut them more slack when it comes to minor usability issues. Unfortunately, sometimes usability and aesthetics can be at odds, also known as “form over function”. Simplici

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