Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
Behavioral Design: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
What are Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics? After analysing usability research, UX expert Jakob Nielsen created suggestions for user interface design that increase product usability and user experience.
The Usability Heuristics use high-level principles to identify usability issues in a design. They’re timeless, even in an ever-changing digital context, as they can be applied across any interface or design style. Nielsen's standards have become a cornerstone of UX and UI design, introduced early in design education and repeatedly revisited throughout a designer's career.
The Basic Idea
Balancing minimalism and aesthetics in any system or product design requires a reduction of all its visible elements to only what’s functionally and aesthetically necessary. Designers incorporate the principles of human visual perception in the concept to create a harmonious, logically-connected information flow that users can follow intuitively to accomplish their objectives.
Our increasing bias toward simplicity and away from uncertainty is the key driver of aesthetic and minimalist design for many day-to-day applications like architecture, consumer tech products, e-commerce, and e-learning.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
