Delineato: A Diagramming User Interface Designed Using a "What You Get is What You Need" Approach

Featuritis or creeping featurism is the tendency for the number of features in a product (usually software product) to rise with each release of the product. Most of the time featurism adds unnecessary complexity to a software product. Therefore, some software designers have recently embraced a minimalistic approach to creating their products by presenting users with very focused, simple software that allows them to conduct their tasks in a distraction-free user interface. However, they achieve this at the expense of cutting down on features, i.e. functionality. Our contribution´s value stems from a design approach that overcomes this major difficulty, and is capable of presenting a distraction-free user interface that is also extremely powerful from a functionality perspective. We illustrate and evaluate our approach through a novel distraction-free diagramming tool called Delineato. The user interface presents the user with the tools needed at the right time to avoid cluttering and leads to significant performance increases when compared to other tools.