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Creating a clean and user-friendly interface
What is simplicity? Simplicity is the property of being effortless, plain and intuitive. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in hardware and applications. Of course, some people like finding out how something works, but for most of us, not being able to operate an interface leads to wasted time and disappointment, and that's not a good thing.
If you are able to take a complex device or a piece of software and somehow [rearrange, reorganize and redesign] the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you're well on the way to providing a better user experience.
One of the techniques you can use in your GUI design is Context based controls.
There are a couple of approaches you can use in interface design that relate to context and unity. One dictates that you have to keep key elements consistent throughout your software or websites to ensure that users know where things are and don't get confused. The second approach is to change controls or navigation according to the content of each page or window. The context based option is one where you display only the stuff the person needs to finish the process they've approached in that single context.
A good illustration of the two attitudes can be seen in the revision of the Microsoft Office GUI. Office 2003, along with its older siblings, used the design principle of leaving the controls unchanged. There was a bunch of buttons displayed on the screen at all times, and these remained the same no matter if you were working with tables, graphics, text or pictures. Microsoft remodeled this interface for Office 2007 applying a content based approach. At the top you now see a toolbar - or a number of tabs. When selected, each tab shows a pack of controls related to any given task, be it proofreading, processing graphics, or simply writing.
The content related approach enables you to demonstrate fewer controls at any given time, but it also gives you more controls that are critical to the current task. I wouldn't advice using a context-heavy approach for all-purpose web interface design because for most websites users expect to see consistent site-wide navigation. This is because every website is different, and it would make the browsing experience much harder if all the individual pages on a particular site were different too.
Having said this, this can be utilized for web applications because they're not just simple websites - they're pieces of software that live in the cloud. People are likely to spend a lot of time on a web app and will have more opportunity to learn how it works. The complexity of some web apps means that you really need to utilize the context based approach, because if you don't, there will be too much on the screen at any given time for anyone to process. By showing only a few relevant controls for a given task, your users can figure out what to do in much less time.
 Standard Toolbar Icons
Science Toolbar Icons
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