Proof that Clutter Slows People Down

Good designers instinctively know that a "clean" and "uncluttered" design is more effective in conveying information. Unfortunately this kind of gut feeling isn't always enough to stop clutter from creeping into designs for everything from websites to store signage to brochures and product packaging. Also, it's hard to quantify clutter. How much information is too much?

Researchers at MIT have may now have a way to help. According to MIT News, researchers "modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter."

By itself, a clutter detector might be interesting to researchers and designers on a sort of academic level. The MIT folks, however, took things a step further and actually demonstrated experimentally that their measure of visual clutter affects human performance in information retrieval. Again according to MIT News the researchers "found good correlation between the time it takes to find a symbol in a map and the amount of clutter according to their measure."

So design purists, now you have the proof that too much information undermines its own usefulness and a tool to measure exactly how much is "too much." You can even download the tool, written in MATLAB format, from MIT's site for free.

What's your favorite overly dense, hard-to-use visual display? My perennial favorite is airport signage. Ever notice that despite the incredible number and variety of signs at airports that when you get off a plan at an unfamiliar gate you usually have no idea which way to go?

Comments

[Barry Tipping]

The software world if full of cluttered interfaces. My least favorite is Microsoft Word which has become something of a "houseboat" of word processors. For the 5% of functionality that I normally use, I have to scan countless icons and navigate "smart" menus that usually hide the function I really want. One of the cleanest UI's I've ever used was the Bryce 3D modeling tool. The "White" interface designed by Kai Krause (of Kai's Power Tools fame) is very intuitive and easy to use. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bryce5screenshot.jpg

Stuart Card did some outstanding work on this subject at Xerox Parc. He developed a Cost of Knowledge Characteristic Function that would let you determine the cost structure of a given interface (in terms of how much effort/time was required to access "good stuff"). He made the somewhat obtuse observation that, "“the fundamental information access task is not finding information, but the optimal use of a person’s scarce time in gaining information.”

If you aren't familiar with Edward Tufte's work on information and UI design, I highly recommend his book "Envisioning Information"
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_ei

[Bruce McCarthy]

I'm a big fan of Tufte. Attended his fun seminar and have all his books.

I also remember Kai's Power Tools and Bryce well! I thought I was the only one!