Refining UI/UX with Minimalist Design and AI: Towards Sustainable and Efficient Digital Experiences

The growing incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in UI/UX design has accelerated the development of minimalist user interfaces. The minimalist design is widely a solution to visual clutter by focusing on simplicity, clarity and user experience confirming its superiority over cluttered design in terms of usability and task efficiency. This research aims to find compare minimalist and cluttered UI designs based on usability and cognitive efficiency while also evaluating the effectiveness of AI-generated compared to human-refined minimalist UIs. Using combination of objective metrics—such as task completion time and visual clutter measures—and subjective evaluations (SUS, SUPR-Q, and NASA-TLX), this research found that minimalist designs consistently outperformed cluttered counterparts by enhancing task performance, reducing cognitive load, and improving overall user satisfaction. Notably, AI-generated minimalist refinements achieved better results than those created by human experts across both quantitative and qualitative measures, highlighting the potential of AI assistance in optimizing interface usability. These findings not only affirm the advantages of minimalist UI design but also demonstrate the superior performance and consistency of AI-generated refinements, suggesting promising assistance of AI in human-computer interaction design. Future research should consider involving a broader pool of human experts to further assess the comparative strengths of manual design input. This work contributes to advancing the role of AI in creating user-centered digital experiences.