New "clutter detector" software to cut confusion

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Written on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by Gemini

The danger of clutter - especially on a visual screen - is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for Web site and map designers, among others.

Now, a team of scientists at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has identified a way to measure visual clutter. Their research, published in the August issue of Journal of Vision, could lead to more user-friendly displays and maps, as well as tips for designers seeking to add an attention-grabbing element to a display. “We lack a clear understanding of what clutter is: what features, attributes and factors are relevant, why it presents a problem and how to identify it,” said lead author Ruth Rosenholtz.

The fact that one person’s clutter is the next person’s organised workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modelled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on colour, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter.

To be useful, such a tool has to capture the effect of clutter on performance. In their paper, Rosenholtz and her colleagues Yuanzhen Li and Lisa Nakano tested the influence of clutter on searching for a symbol in a map, like an arrow indicating “you are here.” They found good correlation between the time it takes to find a symbol in a map and the amount of clutter according to their measure.

In earlier work, they also showed that their clutter detector correlates well with human subjective judgments of clutter. In that case, the team asked 20 people to rank 25 maps of the United States and the city of San Francisco in order from most cluttered to least cluttered. The maps ranged from a grey and green map of the country to city maps overlaid with lines, words and colours.

Although there was a fair bit of disagreement among the people being tested about what constituted clutter, when the researchers compared results from their clutter measure to those of their human subjects, they found a good correlation. Rosenholtz next plans to offer this visual clutter tool, as well as other tools developed in her lab, to designers as part of a user study. She hopes to learn what insights designers get from knowledge of how a user will likely perceive their designs, and how best to present this information to the designers.

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