[Sigia-l] Time to clean up your act

[Ziya Oz]

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace
makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and
colleagues [at MIT] 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.

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.

Story:
<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/clutter-0821.html>
Paper:
<http://www.journalofvision.org/7/2/17/article.aspx>

I don't make this up. I didn't spread news about the wonders of eyetracking
either. I'm innocent. But I deeply worry about MIT's ability to grok what
designers do. I also believe the very first copy of this cluttertracker was
given to Jakob. :-)

-- 
Ziya

³You can¹t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."