I was switching between three different tools last week, each one doing something slightly different, each one with the same design philosophy. A box. A prompt. A blinking cursor that basically says you figure it out.
I typed. Got an answer. Typed again. Got another answer. Scrolled up to find something from twenty minutes ago. Couldn’t. Started over.
At some point I realised I wasn’t working in the tool. I was just repeatedly knocking on a door and hoping whatever came out was what I needed.
There’s a design direction quietly becoming the default in software right now. Strip it back. Remove the menus. Flatten the flows. Make it conversational. And if someone asks why they can’t find anything, tell them that’s the point. That’s the intelligence. Just ask.
It sounds clean. It photographs well. And if you say it fast enough at a product demo, people nod.
But I’ve been sitting with this feeling for a while now, that behind the minimalism, something important is missing. Not features. Not complexity. Just rooms.
Think about your wardrobe for a second.
Not the ideal one. Yours. Right now.
Even if it’s not perfectly organised, there’s a logic to it. A general area where the things you reach for daily live. A section you avoid until laundry day. Shoes on the floor or the rack, but a floor, a rack, not scattered across the house. You built that system without thinking about it, because your brain needed it. Because finding what you need at 8am shouldn’t require a search operation.
Now imagine someone came along and said, actually, let’s simplify. Just pile everything in the centre of the room. When you need something, you’ll find it.
That’s a chat-first interface. That’s the blank box. Everything is technically there. Nothing is actually findable without effort you shouldn’t have to spend.
Or think about this. A 4000 square foot home with no walls.
Same square footage. Same furniture, even. Just no rooms. Kitchen bleeds into bedroom bleeds into living room bleeds into workspace. One giant open floor.
It doesn’t feel spacious. It feels unsafe. A little unmoored. Like you can never quite settle anywhere because nowhere has a defined purpose. You’d spend the first week building makeshift walls out of bookshelves and curtains, just to recover the sense of this is where I do this thing.
That’s what happens when tools remove structure in the name of simplicity. Users don’t experience freedom. They experience a low-grade anxiety they can’t always name, and quietly start building their own systems on the side. Sticky notes. Folders. Saved prompts in a notes app. Structure crawls back in through the window every single time.
Because humans need to know where they are to do good work. That’s not a limitation. That’s just how we’re wired.
The part that gets me is that this is being framed as progress.
Minimal equals advanced. Chat-first equals intelligent. Fewer screens equals more powerful. And there’s a version of that which is true, nobody needs seventeen nested menus to do one simple thing. Over-engineered UI is its own problem.
But there’s a large gap between too much structure and no structure. And somewhere in the race to feel modern, a lot of products are skipping right over the good part in the middle, the part where design actually does its job. Where a user can glance at something and immediately know where they are, what’s available, what comes next.
That’s not hand-holding. That’s clarity. And clarity is underrated right now.
The tools that actually stick, the ones people build habits around, recommend without being asked, quietly miss when they’re forced to switch, they all have something in common. They feel like somewhere. Not a conversation. Not a void that answers back. An actual place, with a logic you can learn and then stop thinking about.
If you’ve ever commissioned a product and watched the team come back with “we simplified the interface” as the headline win, you know this feeling. It looked great in the demo. Then people started asking where things were. Then someone built a workaround. Then the workaround became the actual workflow. Nobody named the problem. But you felt it, that quiet sense that something got lost between the brief and the build.
That’s the standard worth building toward. Not invisible. Not chatty. Just organised enough that your brain can relax and do the actual work.
The real shift isn’t loud but it’s happening. The most interesting design thinking right now isn’t chasing minimalism. It’s chasing orientation. Calm structure. Interfaces that don’t ask you to hold everything in your head.
Because a blank box isn’t sophisticated.
It’s just empty with good branding.
What I keep wondering is, when did we start confusing “less visible” with “less cognitive load”? Because for most people, those are opposites.