Tasukiba's Tidy UI — Roots in a High-School Notebook

Why I’m so stubborn about “simple”

Tasukiba’s UI is built on a stubborn personal belief.

Things belong where they belong. I want to work in a tidy environment.

That’s my personal philosophy. And it ends up driving the UI decisions almost line by line.

Where does this come from? When I trace it, there are a few origin moments. Today’s post is about those.

👉 Tasukiba product page

1. The high-school notebook that kept getting the top grade

In high-school Japanese-classics class, we submitted our notebooks every three months.

After exams, the teacher returned them with grades. Mine got S+ — the highest grade, every single term, and I was the only one in the class.

When she handed them back, she’d announce it as “the cleanest notebook in class.” Every term.

What I was actually doing wasn’t drawing pretty letters. I was, term after term, redesigning the layout for the reader — the future me, the night-before-exam me, the teacher about to grade it.

Don’t use too many colors. Leave white space. Same-purpose information goes in the same place. Set up-front rules for where digressions get parked.

In retrospect, that was UI design.

2. The Courage to Be Disliked sharpened it into a worldview

A book that shaped my way of thinking is The Courage to Be Disliked — a popular take on Adlerian psychology. As I wrote in The Courage to Be Disliked, Part 1 — drop the trauma view, live by teleology, its core message is:

Separate other people’s tasks from your own, and put your attention only on yours.

The world is simpler than you think; if you can live simply, many interpersonal problems also dissolve. After reading the book, I started thinking about almost everything more simply.

Tasukiba’s design philosophy is a direct descendant. Every button on every screen, I keep asking: “is this really this screen’s responsibility?” That habit is almost a port of the book’s central idea into UI design.

3. I’ve seen too many “scattered information” workplaces

Once I started working, I saw a lot of environments where information was scattered, never organized.

During development phases especially, operations and maintenance get deprioritized, and information gets sprayed across three folders, two chat tools, and someone’s email body. We’ve all seen that handover.

Every time I saw it, I felt the same thing.

Just by tidying this up, the organization would change.

This accumulated frustration is the same fuel as

“anger at the structural waste of creative time” (series part 1)
“wanting to build tidy environments” (this post)

Same root, different surface.

Five definitions of “tidy UI”

I’ve made my definition of “tidy” explicit.

1. White space exists

Don’t cram. Let elements breathe.

2. Color is restrained

Too much text, too much color: both drain energy. Aim for a screen you can look at for eight hours without fatigue.

3. Consistency is enforced

Same-purpose buttons get the same color, the same position, the same label, across screens. Users shouldn’t have to think “wait, where’s that here?” — that should never happen.

4. Nothing extra (the math of subtraction)

Functionality: don’t compromise. UI complexity: never accept it. These two are different problems, not one trade-off.

5. The eye moves naturally

Issue list, risk list, retrospective list, memo list — structurally similar screens get the same button placement. Move screens, same actions stay in place.

”If it shouldn’t be there, don’t put it there”

The contrapositive of “things belong where they belong” is “if it shouldn’t be there, don’t put it there.”

Personally, I don’t buy or keep things I don’t value. The same applies to UI.

Unused features: not in the UI
Excessive decoration, gradients, animations: out
Unnecessary confirmation dialogs: out

“Just in case” is usually an excuse. Only keep the confirmations that actually matter.

Exception: ambiguity has a place — but a specific one

There’s one nuance.

Areas to be unambiguous

Things at the core of user trust, that will never change — like tenant isolation. Vague language here rots the root.

Areas to leave room

Things where evolution is realistically expected — like “future LLM extensions.” Users actually want to read these with anticipation. Some vagueness functions as breathing room.

Not “always explicit” or “always vague,” but switching by domain. The reasoning is essentially “task separation” from The Courage to Be Disliked — figure out which thing is which kind of thing, first.

Functionality and UI complexity are different problems

I’ll close with the sentence I want to repeat throughout this series.

Functionality, don’t compromise. UI complexity, never accept it.

That’s the reference I check every time I face a concrete decision.

Some people might find Tasukiba “plain.” That impression is probably right. I’m not spending effort on making features look flashy. I’m spending it on a screen that doesn’t tire you out, no matter how many times you open it.

That goal might have started in a high-school classical-literature notebook.

Next time: where Tasukiba stands in the market, articulated as six axes of differentiation — not from market research, but as a side effect of stubborn preference.

Changing Sunday night and Monday morning — Tasukiba’s worldview — series part 2, the worldview chapter
The Courage to Be Disliked, Part 1 — drop the trauma view, live by teleology — where simple thinking comes from
Think Again and the Binary Bias I Couldn’t See in Myself — questioning the “fully explicit vs. fully vague” dichotomy

About Tasukiba

Tasukiba Knowledge Relay’s UI is held together by the math of subtraction. See the product page for actual screens and the felt sense of “tidy.”