This article is based on a lightning talk I gave at the Outlier conference.

Recently, everyone repeats that “less is more” like it is a solution to all the problems. Like it is another Blockchain or AI. They praise minimalism like it is an objectively the best design for everything – your living room, a website, an artwork (white walls are the most minimal so they are the ultimate artwork!), or data visualization.

But minimalism is not a solution to everything, and it is dangerous to perpetuate such a one-sided view because minimalism often is implemented at a price of accessibility and user experience. Here I will give a glimpse into the dark side of minimalism and how this allegedly best-practice breaks some other, much better practices.

The current status with less being considered as more

I enjoy attending conferences on data visualization like Outlier, Information + and others. In those conferences, many people come on stage and show their projects, praise minimalistic design and repeat the “less is more” mantra. It seems like those are well established principles. But then we hear keynote talks from everyone’s favourite designers Stephanie Posavec or Nadieh Bremer where they explain how NOT following well established principles led them to where they are. Everyone in the audience have their minds blown, feel inspired, and think about adding all that chart junk back to their visualizations.

Something feels off here. We follow established principles so rigidly, but then celebrate not following established principles so joyfully? I have the explanation right away – not following established principles AND creating something awesome at the same time is hard, so that is why common folks follow those principles and the few of The Ones ignore them.

What happens then? The phenomenon which is called “digital sameness” – everything in the digital world just looks, works and feels the same. Usage data is gathered on every website, every button. Its position, colour and shape are A/B tested, every image and thumbnail is selected out of many options with the help of machine learning based on actions of millions of individuals, and you can be sure that what you see have the highest conversion rate. There are certain layouts which convert better, there are certain colours and shapes which convert better. That is why plenty of big websites in the western hemisphere look the same.

Small websites also look the same because their creators download a website theme, which is based on the best-practices of big websites, tweak a few things, and they’re good to go – a well converting website. And then, after a few seconds of reading an article, you get a full-screen overlay asking you to subscribe – because apparently it converts well.

Data visualization projects including interactive data journalism or business dashboards are like those little websites – you have all the tried and tested best-practices, so you just apply what you know is working. The result looks like any other result made by anyone else because the practices applied are the same – the best ones. The more similar it looks to an ideal best-practice dashboard – the better it is. Hey, we’re not doing art here, there is no place for personality or expression, right?

Finally, when everyone follows the same best-practices, we end up all looking the same – this is digital sameness. Like in the song by Groove Armada, “If everyone looked the same, we won’t have looking at each other“.

There are efforts reaching so far as to make all business reporting look the same no matter the author, the company, the industry, the culture – it is called International Business Communication Standards or IBCS for short. I highly recommend looking them up because they provide some excellent ideas on how to summarize and group information. That is a noble endeavour because if you’re not sure what to do, you can just follow exactly what they suggest. But then they even suggest what colours and symbols to use in which cases – looking the same IS the goal.

It seems like the underlying idea of minimalism goes like this – if you’re not great at design – remove all the design and leave the bare minimum. All design is junk. Actually, no design is also a design decision, so just accept ideas about design from others and that’s it. How are we going to learn to think creatively and critically with such an approach?

While poor design decisions can reduce the quality of user experience, great design decisions can enhance user experience. The modern approach to minimalism is somewhere between the poor and the great. Also known as mediocre.

Here is how “less is more” harms user experience

The modern approach to minimalism has drifted from the endeavour of bringing order to the chaotic world of design, insisted by people like industrial designer Dieter Rahms. While his designs definitely look minimalistic, they are actually aimed at enhancing the user experience with a product. The same goes with Apple products – while they might look minimalistic (until the Liquid Glass kicked off), they are actually sophisticated pieces of technology.

Blaise Pascal once said – “I have made this letter longer because I have not had time to make it shorter”. Saying more with less requires in-depth understanding of what you do and what you want to say about that. As well as choosing the message carriers carefully and making sure that they provide maximum information with the least encoding possible. Sounds easy? Not for me.

Modern minimalism looks like a shortcut – apply it without thinking too much and boom – this is the greatest design! Shortcut is a shortcut – fast to apply but misses all the nuance, and deliberate thought that the original minimalism movement embraced. It is like making all the charts bar-charts because bar-chart is generally the best chart for data visualization.

Minimalism vs Guiding

Things, especially mobile apps, are often difficult to use because of minimalistic design! The control of the app is not intuitive because no one really thought about it, but what they did think about is how to make the design look minimalistic. In the end, there are no clues what a swipe or double-tap does! Go and read the documentation if you want to know, adding guides within the app is just against the minimalism. Having more buttons with clear icons often could solve the issue, but again – buttons are additional objects, this is not-minimalistic! Adding some visual clues how segments of an app are separated from each other would be so helpful, but hey, clues are additional objects, and minimalism requires relying on white space only!

I have asked an AI to create me a minimalistic remote control, and here is the result – a truly minimalistic device with a single button. Quite obviously, we are losing a bunch of functionality because we can just turn the TV on and off and that’s it. Probably that is 80% of use cases, so maybe it is fine not to care about other cases?

I have asked to create another iteration where more functionality would be possible, and here is the result – a still minimalistic design with a single button. Double-tap on the left increases volume, double-tap on the right – decreases it. Slide-tap navigates the channel. Short-tap dims the screen and so on. How to remember all those movements? Anyone using fancy minimalistic apps on Android or Apple knows the struggle when you trigger some function with your awkward moves and then have no idea how to undo that.

I know that Excel users look at me confused – they memorize hundreds of shortcuts. However, most of the products and visualisations I talk about are not used daily, only occasionally, no one is going to remember how to use that monthly review dashboard.

Fewer colours in a dashboard might mean more confusion, not more clarity. How do I distinguish a bar chart from a menu if they are both squared and have the same colour? Is reading labels the only way to distinguish between categories? Colours are so powerful, and while it is easy to mess up with them, skipping them feels like going to fight vampires without any garlic.

Fewer clues do not mean more clarity. Fewer clues mean less clarity when the overall usability is not well thought and tested for this particular app or visualization. Less is just less when it is not deliberately made intuitive and well suited for the purpose. Less is just less when we care about looks and not functionality.

Minimalism vs Accessibility

Minimalistic design is often for able, well sighted people. Overencoding, one of Accessibility good practices, is a NO for minimalism. Relying entirely on colour to encode a category in a scatterplot will be lauded by the minimalist community, even better if instead of colour hues we use shades of a single colour. But if you want to enhance readability – using contrasting colours will be a better decision, and using different markers along with colour will enhance it even more. But probably 80% of the readers are well sighted and read the visual under a good light on a good screen. So, maybe it is fine not to care about them?

The modern approach to minimalism is a lot about exclusion – the more you exclude, the more you focus, the better it is. While accessibility is about inclusion – the more people find the data accessible, the better it is.

Some time ago, Power BI introduced a new functionality for adding borders around bars in bar charts. Adding borders around bars tremendously improves readability, so you can have less contrast between bars to make them distinguishable. Which allows the use of single hue but varied shades in a clustered bar chart. Which is definitely more minimalistic and more Accessible than using lots of colour hues.

Meanwhile, clueless folks raged on the internet claiming that this functionality is too much, and they stick to “less is more”.

Such an approach to minimalism even beats the purpose of Minimalism – making things simple. Things are getting crazy.

Minimalism vs Being relatable

People like to express themselves. Brands also spend massive resources to express themselves. And expressing yourself is sometimes about being different. And being different is sometimes about not following best-practices. I like sweets. Sweet are bad for my health. But I still like sweets.

Even if we use things for work – we still need emotion, relatability, the human element. People put stickers on their laptops. They put desktop wallpapers. They put photos of their relatives or pets on their desks. If an office looks too minimalistic (read: like a hospital) – people do various kinds of stuff to make it more human – put flowers, a board with photos from parties, or colourful rubber ducks.

I remember the first versions of Sharepoint. The most common request was to be able to like a content like on Facebook. Now I work with Teams and finally Pepe the frog emoji is there and people are actually using it.

I remember a project presented by Stephanie Posavec in Information + conference which was about making hospital look less minimalistic and more like a thing where humans would spend a lot of time.

Moreover, why on earth all AI vendors are trying their AI to sound more like human with emotions, with Grok going over the top? They are definitely not trying to be minimalistic.

I believe that, this weird and false idea that people aren’t concerned about human things at work comes from tech gurus trying to solve a non-tech problem using a tech approach. They are giving advice on tech, but forgetting that they give advice for humans.

A dashboard is part of work and follows the same principles as other parts of work. Easy to use, nice-looking and relatable dashboard will create less stress and will be more memorable and actionable, than just minimalistic dashboard. But I have to agree that a minimalistic dashboard will create less stress and be more memorable and actionable than a confusing, ugly and off-putting dashboard.

Here in the image below, you can see how a minimalistic dashboard compares to my favourite dashboard.

So, should I abandon minimalism whatsoever and is “more is more” now?

One of the original ideas of minimalism is that form follows function. First we decide what should we do and then find the best form for the action (it might be a pie chart!).

The modern approach to minimalism is just another form which might be blindly followed and slammed on top of a data visualization or a dashboard without considering its function, and eventually breaking it.

Currently, minimalism is praised as something just good by itself – minimalist design = good design. Like being bad at minimalism is the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.

I am not against minimalism, I am against blindly assuming that minimalism is always best. This is the minimalism trap!

Of course, if we let people do more of what they want without simply following best-practices, then more bad designs will follow, but more exceptional designs will also emerge, and I am excited to have more fun by talking trash about those bad ones, and enjoying those exceptional ones.

Focus on the best user experience, let yourself experiment, and apply minimalism where you see it’s appropriate!