Delineato: Designing Distraction-Free GUIs

A large amount of software products offer a wide
range and number of features. This is called featuritis or creeping
featurism and tends to rise with each release of the product. Feautiris
often adds unnecessary complexity to software, leading to longer
learning curves and overall confusing the users and degrading their
experience. We take a look to a new design approach tendency that
has been coming up, the so-called “What You Get is What You
Need” concept that argues that products should be very focused,
simple and with minimalistic interfaces in order to help users conduct
their tasks in distraction-free ambiences. This isn’t as simple to
implement as it might sound and the developers need to cut down
features. Our contribution illustrates and evaluates this design method
through a novel distraction-free diagramming tool named Delineato
Pro for Mac OS X in which the user is confronted with an empty
canvas when launching the software and where tools only show up
when really needed.

• Fernando Miguel Campos
• Fernando Jesus Aguiar
• Pedro Campos

• Diagramming
• HCI
• usability
• user interface.

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1990.
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[5] Richard Cobbet, MacWorld UK magazine, Issue 265 (October 2013).
[6] Josh Centers, “Mac Gems: Delineato Pro is a clean, inexpensive diagram
and mind-mapping app”, MacWorld website (May 2013).