Clean, Uncluttered, and Ready for Overload

In today’s age of endless information, my biggest gripe is that we don’t have enough information being beamed to us at all times.

Or rather, useful information; because, unlike some information has no impact on my life (usually something regarding some movie star).

I do care about things that do impact me, be it the the personal contacts in my life, or information regarding the products and services I encounter (and how it all became possible), and even witty comments people make.

It is a lot of information. Some people get overloaded from it. Or, more likely, overloaded by the useless information they don’t care about. Nothing shuts down the brain faster then useless information piled on someone in disregard to that person.

Which brings me to admiration for clean user interface, and the purpose of this blog post today (and it has been a long stretch since my last post).

This is all that shows up when you first load Google’s homepage, unless you move your mouse around it. Simple.

Granted, it is vastly different from the Bing search page unless there is a doodle up to suggest a search just like Bing’s daily picture does, but it does get to the point, which is that you came there to find information.

Search engines are made to sift through the information, so they are a keen example of finding information. But they are and were the start. More and more interfaces and devices are focusing on the minimalist, easy information access philosophy that today brings. Even when the device or program is made for something narrow, there is a trend toward easy access.

And rightfully so; anything moving against this trend is like admitting you want to restrict information. Restricting information is generally a bad policy.

This is the trend towards a minimalist UI. The user interface should only be visible if it contributes something. Of course, sometimes it needs to contribute constantly, so it is always visible in a non-visible way. As users use, the UI becomes less visible and more visible. The information is quickly and efficiently absorbed.

So the interface trend is tilting to clean, uncluttered, and ready for overload.