less is more, tested
Mies made the phrase famous and Browning wrote it first. How to turn it from a slogan into a test.
Robert Browning put the words in a painter's mouth in 1855: well, less is more, Lucrezia. A century later Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school's last director, used them to defend buildings in which the structure is all you see. Since then the phrase has been printed on enough posters to count as decoration itself.
A slogan tells you what to believe. A test tells you what to do. Here is the test.
remove one thing
Take a screen. Remove one element, any element. Then ask three questions. Can the person still do the main thing? Can they still tell where they are? Can they still tell what just happened? If the answer to all three is yes, leave the element out. Pick another and ask again.
Keep going until an answer is no. Put back the last thing you removed. That screen, the one just before the no, is the design.
The order matters. Start with the things you are proudest of. They are the most likely to be there for you rather than for the person using the screen.
a card, before and after
Here is an object card the way it first arrived: an image with a gradient over it, a badge that says new, a title, a subtitle, three tags, a star rating, a view button, a save button, a share icon and a shadow. Ten things.
Removing the gradient changed nothing: the image was already legible. Removing the shadow changed nothing: the border already separated the card. The badge went because the library sorts by date. The tags went because tags are for filtering and this card is not a filter. The rating went because we do not rate chairs. The share icon moved to the system share sheet on the detail screen. The save button went to the detail screen too, where there is room to say what saving does.
What stayed: the image, the title, a line for the designer and the year, and one button that says view. Four things. Everything the ten did, the four do, and you can read the card from across the room.
less is counted in decisions
Less is not measured in pixels. A big yellow block with one word in it is less than six small grey links, because it asks the eye for one decision instead of six. White space is not emptiness; it is the pause that makes the next thing legible. A screen with three large things on it is calmer than a screen with twelve small ones, even if the three cover more of the glass.
when less is less
The test has a guard, and it is the function test from the first article in this journal. An icon-only button with no label passes the three questions right up until someone cannot tell what it does. A missing error message passes until something goes wrong. A removed focus ring passes until someone presses the tab key.
Feedback is a use. Labels are a use. Margins are a use. Removing them is not reduction, it is subtraction, and the two look alike only on a mockup. Take away until the thing stops working, then put the last thing back. That sentence is the whole method, and it is more useful than the slogan.