Nothing Left to Take Away

"An engineer's job is done not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- That French Guy Who Wrote "The Little Prince"

NothingLeftToTakeAway, better known as "Minimalism", is more of an ideal to strive for than a particular design pattern, per se. It's simply the idea that, all else being equal, an interface with fewer widgets is superior to an interface with more widgets.

Fewer widgets that you don't need means it's easier to find the widget that you do need. There's more screen space available for your content. There are fewer things to learn. There's less distraction and less cognitive burden caused in the user's mind by mysterious and poorly understood doodads hovering around the edges of the screen.

That's "all else being equal", of course. The reason a lot of interfaces are the opposite of minimalistic is because they're interfaces for powerful systems with a lot of features. To remove interface widgets, you need to either be very creative to find ways to do so without sacrificing the power of the software (this is hard). Or, you have to identify features whose functionality is not worth their interface cost, and remove them (this is also hard).

It's often said that most users use less than 20% of the features in an interface, meaning the other 80% is needless waste to them. The problem is, for every user it's a different 20%. Life is hard.