One Man's Clutter Is Another Man's UI

Those smart folks at MIT have written a software-based "clutter detector." Ha, I married one. When I used to go into the office, I could get by with describing a tidy, chaos-free office that, in truth, didn't exit. But home offices change all that.

So what does it matter? According to Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences group, clutter causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks.

Of course, Rosenholtz and students Yuanzhen Li and Lisa Nakano didn't have my office -- home or otherwise -- in mind when they wrote the software. What they were looking into was "visual clutter" like the user interfaces we stare at all day long. And then they came up with a way to measure that visual clutter by examining data on color, contrast, and orientation -- and their affect on our performance.

The experimental software, which is Feature Congestion and Subband Entropy Measures of Visual Clutter (which, for a title, seems a bit of verbal clutter) was written in MATLAB and is freely available.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:46 PM  Permalink