Design is one of the most important drivers of user engagement. As users’ preferences shift toward a simpler interface, stripping the UI to its very basic, necessary elements is the key to success. Minimalism is a perfect marriage of form and function. It’s greatest strength is clarity of form —  clean lines, generous whitespace, and minimal graphical elements brings simplicity to even the most confounding subject matter. That is, of course, if it’s used effectively.

Minimalist design has to be concise, clear, and consistent to be usable. Your interaction system should aim to address problems for your users through clear visual communication. This is why a beautiful minimalist app combined with great usability is so impressive: an easily navigated, simple app can be a very powerful form of communication. But in order to achieve this goal, you need to focus on following moments:

Simple Color Scheme

Simplifying the color scheme improves the user experience while having too many colors can have a negative impact upon it. There are a number of predefined color scheme standards that make creating new schemes easier, especially for beginners:

• Monochromatic scheme. Monochromatic color schemes are made up of different tones, shades and tints within a specific hue. By modifying the saturation and brightness of a single hue, you can generate multiple colors, and color scheme it’s not overwhelming on the eye.
  

• Analogous color scheme. Analogous schemes are created by using three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. A minimalist gesture-driven task manager app Clear use analogous colors to visually prioritize important tasks and highlight the most critical ones (the topmost items will be the boldest in color, while items lower on the list will be lighter and more subtle).
  

Yahoo! weather app displays a nice photo of each weather location, and the most important data you need is immediately visible while it’s just a single tap to drill down into more detailed data. Rather than cover the photo with another UI layer, the app keeps you in context after you tap — the detailed information is easily revealed and the photo remains in the background. The interaction is so intuitive that it takes nothing more than a second to return to your previous location.

• Apple uses the San Francisco family of typefaces to provide consistent reading experience across all platforms (the San Francisco font for iOS 9 is called SF-UI).
• Roboto and Noto are the standard typefaces on Google Android and Chrome.
  

Divide by Elements and Spacing, Not Lines

Lines and dividers often used to clearly delineate specific sections or categories within a screen. But adding too many of these elements can result in crowded interfaces.

Less lines and dividers will give your interface a cleaner, modern and more functional feel. There are other ways to separate content with a methods such as using blocks, spacing or colors. Calendar App from Google is a good example of how leveraging space and using shadows instead of drawing lines helps to define different sections in a non-obtrusive manner.

Conclusion

Minimalist interfaces and other design techniques are certainly a way to achieve good design, but they are not the goal. The ultimate goal is to simplify our interfaces and make them more functional and usable. Simple user flows, clear visuals, and forgiving design help create a seamless interaction.

Thank you!