Can Visual Clutter be Measured?

The answer seems to be yes! As I just read in a DDJ newsletter, Ruth Rosenholtz of MIT is doing just that. You can download the code but by taking just a quick look I couldn't find a Makefile or build instructions. I didn't look very hard, though.Pr Well, let's give the project some more time, but I think the idea is very interesting. A lot of UIs are cluttered and not very intuitive for the user to work with. Any attempt to make better and easier UIs is a step in the right direction. I must say though that learning how to make good UIs makes more sense - from a developer's point of view - than to detect if an UI is cluttered once it's done. An approach used by Apple is Paper Prototyping, for example.