In Search of a Clutter Metric for Websites
MeasuringU
UX research and software supporting all stages of the user and customer experience.
A disorganized closet. A messy bedroom.
Clutter can make a space feel stressful and make it hard to find things.
But it’s not just your mother talking about clutter. We often use the same language to describe digital spaces like websites.
In our UX research practice, we have frequently encountered users and designers criticizing website interfaces for being cluttered and stakeholders who worry about the experiential and business consequences of a cluttered website.
But what exactly does it mean for a website to appear cluttered?
It’s one thing to casually describe something with a word like?clutter; it’s another thing to measure it.
In this article, we describe our search for a way to quantify the perception of clutter on websites.
Read the full article on MeasuringU's Blog
Summary and Discussion
In this literature review of the construct of clutter, we found:
The everyday conception of clutter includes two components. The perception of clutter can be driven by a disorganized collection of needed objects and/or the presence of unnecessary objects. These components suggest different decluttering strategies—reorganizing needed objects and discarding unnecessary objects.
Research on the measurement of clutter in UI design has mostly focused on objective measurement. Early research on alphanumeric displays explored metrics such as overall density, local density, grouping, and layout complexity. Later research evaluated metrics based on perceptual psychology like feature congestion, subband entropy, and edge density.
No standardized questionnaires are currently available for the measurement of perceived clutter on websites. There is a published questionnaire for subjective clutter in advanced cockpit displays, but its technical items and factors do not seem to be appropriate for assessing consumer websites. A more promising line of research comes from the fields of marketing and advertising regarding consumer reaction (positive and negative) to online advertisements.
Bottom line: This literature review covered past work in the measurement of clutter, both objective and subjective, in the research domains of the presentation of information on displays and the influence of advertisements on user experiences. This review is a first step in the search for a clutter metric for websites.
For more details about this research, see the paper we published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (Lewis & Sauro, 2024).
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2 天前Curious if there's a correlation between the number of links, percentage of white space, and the number of clicks before someone exits, uses the help/chat or goes to the contact us page; i.e, gives up trying to find something on their own. Excited to see the results! *Not a designer or analyst, so my terms are not precise.
UX Architect/Researcher
3 周Hmm ‘perceived clutter’ vs a measure of actual behaviour like an AB test? We just ran an AB on a page that many perceived as ‘cluttered’ (ps federal government websites have a LOT of tasks and links). We removed a big chunk of the clutter (least-used links and text) and you know what, nothing much happened at all. Yes for that group of removed links, the extra step changed their usage pattern, but for the rest of the supposedly ‘cluttered’ page, no impact. The top tasks were at the top of the page, people still found them easily. No giant images got in the way. Why not stick to real metrics?
Senior Product Designer
3 周That's an interesting question! I was aware of a clutter score used for actual spaces (in the case of hoarding) and I think AI tools that will generate a score based on an image. It also makes me think about how visual information is structured (hypothesizing clutter being closer to white noise like randomness) and lacking relevance to a persons goals.