“Interfaces should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.” — Jakob Nielsen
Below are six small, working demos. Each one deliberately buries the one thing that matters under decoration, clutter, or noise that doesn't. Try each one, then click “Reveal what actually happened” to see what a minimalist version would have stripped away.
Four loud, colourful, purely decorative badges dominate the form. The one thing that actually does something — the Submit button — is small, grey, and tucked in the corner, visually screaming "I don't matter" while the clutter around it does nothing at all.
The only thing you actually came here to do is turn on Dark Mode. It's buried in a grid of eight other toggles — all styled identically, none grouped or prioritised — that have nothing to do with your task.
Twenty icons, all the same size, same spacing, same lack of labels. Only two of them — Save and Print — are used daily; the rest are rare or decorative. Nothing visually distinguishes the two that matter from the eighteen that don't.
A pulsing, high-contrast promo banner sits directly above the actual content, fighting for attention it hasn't earned. It's pure decoration — dismissing it changes nothing about the page underneath.
This paragraph is the actual content of the page. Notice how much harder it was to even notice it was here.
One simple field, and the exact same instruction is repeated four different ways — label, placeholder, tooltip, and helper text — all saying "enter your postcode". None of that repetition adds information; it just adds reading.
A faint wall of decorative repeated text sits behind the real paragraph, adding nothing but visual noise that competes with actual reading — and makes the text harder to focus on even though it's technically still "readable".
This is the real paragraph of content. It should be the only thing competing for your attention, but it isn't.