Universal Principles of UX

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What isn’t there matters.

Across all creative fields, what isn’t there is just as important as what is there. In fashion, Coco Chanel advised, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” In music, Miles Davis famously quipped, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” In design, Jan Tschichold noted that “white space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.

The same holds true when designing interfaces. Except that in the world of UX, the gaps or spaces are about the way features and content are presented to the user during a specific interaction. Or rather, how they’re not presented to the user. It could mean hiding the navigation when the user is actively reading, ...