Designing widgets that respect your attention

A good widget answers a question before you finish asking it, then disappears. The discipline is restraint: every pixel that does not help you decide something is a pixel competing for attention you would rather spend elsewhere.

Calm interfaces share a few habits. They show one clear number instead of five vague ones. They use motion to explain, never to perform. And they assume you are busy, so they earn their place on screen every single second.

Design for the glance

Treat each widget as a sentence, not a paragraph. If a person cannot understand it in the length of a glance, it is doing too much. Subtract until only the answer remains.