Why to use & examples of great minimalistic design

Minimalist Website Design

Minimalist web design is the crux of creating a large-scale consumer product that millions of people respond to because of its intuitive user interface and accessibility. Having a website that is easy to understand often involves eliminating all the details that make it confusing or cluttered. Having more than one thing to do on any one page can make the website confusing. Minimalist web design is practiced by all three major tech companies, and it is one of the significant features that make the brands so lovable. Brands like Microsoft don’t have as much love coming to them on the brand index of consumer love and appreciation. There is actually a brand index that rates how much consumers love companies. The companies that consistently get rated highest are the ones that have minimalism as a part of their web design.

Facebook, Google, and Apple all employ minimalism in their websites, products, and services. By eliminating the clutter, the user is able to focus on what’s important to him, and that’s content. Content is the key to unlocking the user’s appreciation for the product, and if the user is distracted by the interface, or there are too many dongles and buttons, then the user can feel overwhelmed, and they won’t want to deal with the site at all.

One of the most stunning examples of anti-design in the industry was the Gmail interface. It won several design awards because of its preference for anti-design. By eliminating everything that wasn’t necessary, they enabled the user to get to what he was looking for, his content. Using e-mail is hard enough, and many people are uncomfortable with it, preferring snail mail, but Gmail actually drove a lot of new users to e-mail because of its ease of use.

Minimalism is also a large part of Facebook’s design. On Mark Zuckerberg’s profile, he talks about minimalism being an important part of his design philosophy. Minimalism is what has helped FaceBook garner so many users. While other users were flocking away from MySpace in droves, Mark Zuckerberg had the bright idea to make his website as simple as possible because this would drive more people to use it. Whatever is simplest and easiest to understand will be used the most.

Apple makes simplicity a leading part of their products. Even in their website design, they stress the principles of minimalist website design and eschew the negative factors of clutter and color. Simple colors like white and gunmetal gray, along with silver, black, and gray, give the website the impression of precision and ease of use.

If you want to employ the principles of minimalist website design in your business, you’ll find that users are much more responsive to it. This is because a smart person can understand something simple, but a stupid person can’t understand something complex. Therefore, if you make it simple from the get-go, both types of audiences will understand it. The majority of audiences will favor a design that is minimalistic versus cluttered.

This is a guest post by Rodney Warner – Owner of the Denver Web Design company Connective Web Design. You can follow Rodney on Google+ to keep up on topics such as this.