Design patterns, which have been widely used by software engineering communities, have been claimed to improve software design in previous studies. However, there is little empirical evidence to support such a claim. Additionally, the benefits of design patterns in software design have not been studied in sufficient detail to date. As a result, in this study, we used empirical methods to evaluate whether design patterns help developers improve the simplicity of software design. In particular, we analyzed how easily a given software design was understood. We chose the well-known Visitor pattern as the design pattern for this study. The results suggest that the Visitor pattern could help developers improve software design simplicity. Specifically, a class diagram with the Visitor pattern was found to be easier to understand than a class diagram without the design pattern.