The Brilliant creative team blog

Whilst flicking through a news article about website design and user friendly interfaces I came across a term I had not heard of before ’false simplicity’. After reading up on it a little more it seems that false simplicity is a relatively new term and put very simply refers to minimalism taken too far!

As designers we are constantly striving for clean, great looking and easily navigatable interfaces with an aim to increase user-friendliness but are we in danger of making the features so simple and minimalistic that their functions become cryptic?

There are a few items on the list that fall under the ’false simplicity’ moniker:

- Icons as links with no supporting text or no supporting visual indication.
- Symbolic representations of large or vague ideas that would be better explained in text.
- Minimal (or even zero) text.
- Interfaces so “clean” that it’s hard to find the menu bar or other options.
- Reliance on mouse-over descriptions to convey what buttons do.

False simplicity is particularly insidious for designers because it’s hard for them to see. A cryptic GUI can make perfect sense to the designer, who knows everything about how it works already, while completely stumping everyone else.

Simplicity is the ideal middle ground maintaining a healthy balance between minimalism and robust features.

... so there you have it ’false simplicity’, feel like you have learnt something new today?