A project that I am involved in has raised an interesting debate about reducing clutter in an interface.
Specifically, one side believes that it is ok to completely hide some interface elements and only reveal them on rollover. I don't mean disable or dim them in a normal state and then make them obviously available on a rollover state, I mean make them magically appear out of nowhere when the user mouses over a specific area. Of course, the thinking is that placement should be intuitive, kind of like the user would be moving their mouse around thinking "if I were a button that did X, I would want to be here..." and then the element would appear. The argument is that while the functionality is completely hidden and needs to be discovered, it only needs to be found once. The advantage is that you reduce the amount of visual clutter. I'm opposed to the idea. I don't like forcing my users to hunt and peck around an application to learn what it does. The "they only have to find it once" belief feels like a crutch. An elegantly designed interface can be both immediately usable and pleasing to look at. One shouldn't be sacrificed for the other. For the life of me, though I can't find statistics to back up my instinct. I'd rather have some hard facts about the subject. Does anyone know of any studies or articles that address this? ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
