Comments on: Clutter

By: “Over the years, we’ve learned that users have a different meaning of ‘clutter’ than the designers do. It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual content.” | jonathan stegall: creative tension

Mon, 21 May 2012 01:56:49 +0000

[...] Clutter » UIE Brain Sparks [...]

By: SXSW: How to design, simply | Art&Seek | Arts, Music, Culture for North Texas

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:09:56 +0000

[...] Hogue built his talk around a specific premise: Complexity is easy, but simple is hard. As Bowles/Box mentioned last year, government forms are a great example – they get designed augmented and stuffed to the gills with questions and explanations coming from multiple departments without anyone taking the time to make them easier to navigate. And it happens everywhere – whether it’s a website, a form or a brochure, too many stakeholders weigh in until the product is irreversibly cluttered. [...]

By: Effective Website Design - 160 Articles of Autumn 2011 - PSD to HTML Blog

Effective Website Design - 160 Articles of Autumn 2011 - PSD to HTML Blog — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:56:17 +0000

[...] Clutter http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/11/04/clutter/ by Jared Spool: “Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user [...]

By: Tim Leighton-Boyce

Tim Leighton-Boyce — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:07:51 +0000

Actually cutting all that extra stuff out can be a real challenge.

There’s a great article with tips on how to approach the work of de-cluttering designs and eliminating unnecessary functions on the Boagworld web site:

http://boagworld.com/usability/three-secrets-to-simplicity/?t=1320659212

By: What 'clutter' means to your users | Dan Rosenthal | writing for a better web

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:37:03 +0000

[...] our more in Jared Spool’s article “Clutter” on User Interface Engineering’s blog Brainsparks. This entry was posted in Sharing [...]

By: What Is Clutter? – David Robert Hogg

What Is Clutter? – David Robert Hogg — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:24:20 +0000

[...] is an amorphous term that refers to everything the user has no interest in. It’s not just how much is on the page but how relevant that content is. Clutter is what [...]

By: Louise Hewitt

Louise Hewitt — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:41:45 +0000

Nice article, and yes – complaints about ‘clutter’ are something we hear a lot when we benchmark intranets for our members.

It’s a good reminder that a non-native intranet evaluator can fail to identify clutter in this sense – that’s why real-user feedback is such a critical part of any intranet evaluation.

Just a further thought – perhaps there are two types of clutter:

- visual clutter: that which over stimulates the eye (analogous in the physical work place to an untidy desk or a over fussy interior design) that translates into the digital workplace as too many competing items and styles on a page or in a workspace.

- mental clutter: that which prevents us from isolating and executing a single task (analogous to a overly long to-do list, a meeting with too many items on the agenda, or a filing cabinet full of uncategorised documents) that translates into the digital workplace as a weak information architecture that fails to group items according to user needs and clearly label these bundles and tasks so that they can be prioritised in a workflow or information seeking activity.

Hmmm, this post seems to be becoming overly cluttered itself. Thanks for the article.

By: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 06:16:55 +0000

[...] When we hear the word “clutter”, we think of visual noise. But Jared Spool explains what users mean when they say that word: Over the years, we’ve learned that users have a different meaning of “clutter” than the [...]

By: Cole Lyman

Cole Lyman — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 20:31:20 +0000

Reminds me of Cameron Moll’s mantra, “good designers redesign while great designers realign” paraphrased. Here is the supporting article by Cameron himself http://m.alistapart.com/articles/redesignrealign

By: Hans

Hans — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:27:13 +0000

Very interesting. I think we have a similar problem in our intranet. In the last user satisfaction survey (completed last week), most of the users complained that the navigation is very poor and they don’t find the content they need.
I think the real reason is not that the navigation is not easy (we reduced from 11 levels to max. 5 levels last year). On the one hand, it might be that the content is not important enough for their daily work, but on the other hand, it is likely a performance issue, because the loading time per page is minimum 3-5 sec. So even if it takes max. 5 clicks to get to the content, users feel like it was more, because of the long loading times…

By: John Mohr

John Mohr — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 12:25:32 +0000

Excellent article, it would have been great to see the example pages mentioned.