Superfluous Elements in Modern Web Design
Minimalism is not a stylistic quirk, it is the solution to the problem of information overload. At its best, it aims to focus the user’s attention on the task at hand so that their experience interacting with your site is pleasurable rather than frustrating. The easiest way to achieve minimalism is to remove all that is superfluous from your design. So here is my list of those visual elements that we can do without.
Back Buttons
The browser back button is a fundamental part of learning how to interact with websites. You click a link, the content is irrelevant so you click back in the hope of finding the right link. This is how we learn the internet. There is no need to replicate that functionality and it is obtuse to break that fundamental part of the browsing experience with poorly made Flash sites or ajax.
Tweet/Digg/Stumbleupon Icons
People who use these services would be better served by actually learning how to embed the action in their browser. It is a case of teaching a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish finger.
Clocks/Today’s Date
As the web matures, we learn to put away the superfluous baggage of youth and focus on getting the job done. Again, we have clocks and dates in our computers. All other implementations are wasteful of space and attention.
Breadcrumbs
Any decent web application should have urls that act as structural breadcrumbs. There should be no need to add the superfluous layer on top of it. Breadcrumbs have always been secondary, fixing where things have gone wrong otherwise, it is a way of papering over the cracks.
Search Button
A search box should be able to receive input without a button. We do this everyday with our web browsers so why shouldn’t we do the same with the search entries. Feel free to add some text stating that it is a text box, otherwise ignore it.
Duplicate Links
People sometimes assume that if you want to emphasise something then linking to it twice doubles the chance of someone clicking on it. Wrong! What you do is dilute the value of that link scattering the attention of the user.
Tickers
The idea with tickers is to make you seem modern and up to date. The reality is that it makes you seem like someone out of the eighties or whenever ticker tape was last actually used.