Fewer screens forced better thinking.

Design · 5 min read

A client came in wanting everything. Multiple user flows, customisation options, a settings page for every preference, onboarding screens with animations. When we listed out all the features they wanted, it would have been fifty-plus unique screens. That's not an MVP. That's a finished product for a company with twenty developers.

I told them we had room for about fifteen. Maybe twenty if we were clever. That's the design package. That's what fits in the timeline and the budget. And honestly, it's what fits in a user's head.

The reaction was predictable. "But we need all of it." No. You need the thing that proves the idea works. Everything else can wait. And what happened next proved the point better than I ever could have argued it.

Constraints force prioritisation

When you have unlimited screens, every feature gets its own real estate. Settings get three screens. Onboarding gets five. The "about" page gets a full layout. But when you only have fifteen screens, you have to ask a harder question: what's the one thing a user needs to do, and what's the fastest path to doing it?

That question kills the fluff. The settings page that was going to have twelve toggles? We put the three that actually matter on the profile screen and deferred the rest. The onboarding flow with five animated slides? We replaced it with a single welcome screen and a "get started" button. The customisation options that would let users change colours, fonts, and layouts? Gone. Sensible defaults that work for everyone.

Every cut made the app faster to use. Not just faster to build. Faster to use. Because fewer screens means fewer taps, fewer decisions, and fewer opportunities for the user to get lost. The constraint didn't compromise the product. It improved it.

Making something simpler is harder

Here's the paradox. Designing fifteen screens takes more thought than designing fifty. When you have room for everything, you don't have to make hard choices. You just keep adding. When you have a limit, every screen has to earn its place. Every element on every screen has to justify its existence.

That's where the design work actually happens. Not in making things look good. In deciding what stays and what goes. In combining two screens into one without losing clarity. In finding ways to show more information without adding more UI. The best designs I've done have been the most constrained ones because the constraint forced creativity.

There's a reason the original iPhone launched with a handful of apps and a home screen. Apple could have shipped every feature they had in development. They chose not to. The simplicity is what made it revolutionary. Not the technology. The editing.

Your users will thank you

People don't download your app hoping to explore fifty screens. They download it hoping to do one thing. Book the appointment. Track the medication. Find the supplier. The faster they can do that thing, the more likely they are to come back. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group consistently shows that task completion rates drop as interface complexity increases. More screens, more confusion.

If you're starting your first app, think about screens like real estate. Every one costs money to design, money to develop, and cognitive effort for the user to navigate. The fewer you need, the cheaper the build, the simpler the experience, and the happier the person using it.

The client I mentioned? By the time we finished the design, they agreed. Fifteen screens told the story better than fifty would have. Not because we cut corners. Because we cut everything that wasn't the story.

Sources
Simplicity vs. Choice (Nielsen Norman Group) - More options reduce user satisfaction and task completion.
Hick's Law (Laws of UX) - Decision time increases logarithmically with the number of options.

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