Recently, there have been many calls from the online community to cut through unnecessary clutter and show ONLY the most pertinent information one particular time.  Chrome has been the most recent rendition of this, as it incorporates its “omnibar” for virtually any task you may want to do, and a tabbed replacement for the menu bar to save valuable pixels on the user’s screen.  Some have called for even less clutter, but at what point have we created too much of not enough?

The iPod Shuffle. So simple, you can’t use it.A call from a winmatrix.com forum member to “Improve Chrome’s UI” suggests that we should do away with the omnibar in its current form in favor of moving it to the actual tab text.  When one clicks on the title text, it instead shows the URL and an omnibar-looking edit box where new URLs or URL edits can take place.  My background has always been in both IT and design–while this may or may not be common, it has proven invaluable in solving design problems by actually observing user behavior–and to me this is a useless suggestion for both the computer savvy and non-savvy crowds for the following reasons:

For the computer-savvy crowd, we often go the URL bar to see precisely where we are in a site’s hierarchy.  It is easy to ascertain spatially, and thus informationally, where we are within a site by the contents of the URL bar.  Additionally, the GET variables in an address bar are often invaluable to getting a particular result with a particular page on a website. The author could have used POST variables to do the same thing, but opted not to in favor of minor customizations offered by people who understand how to use it.

For the non-computer-savvy, I will go out on a pretty sturdy limb by saying that MOST computer users aren’t rocket scientists or Computer Science majors.  I generally install Chrome on everyone’s computer that I work on who still has Internet Exploder as a default.  MOST of them are confused with its significantly overhauled way of doing almost everything, but overwhelmingly, people love it once they learn to use it.  Simply going a step further and dropping off 98% of your UI components is going to make this crowd want to kill you.

Finally, for both technical- and non-technical users, most of us identify with site URLs more quickly than we do with title text.  We’ve all been around the internet long enough to know that site authors/designers have HORRIBLE practices in choosing relevent or dynamic title text.  How many times have we seen a site with a title that has cute text art that effectively pushes the relevant title out of sight (and kills SEO in the process)?  We need the URL as assistance to overcome designer wrongdoing.

At the end of the day, the user experience of the internet needs to cater to the needs of the user, not vice-versa.  Sure, we need to avoid unnecessary clutter (See: HavenWorks.com), but there’s a happy medium that we can achieve without designing a browser that gets rid of the UI entirely.