I’ve been in this business for about 8 years now and the one thing that still gets me is how easy it is for people to get caught up on the misconception about a page being cluttered.

Now before my career shifted into the user experience world, I was a marketing guy. I say this because I fully understand and appreciate the marketer’s need for their design to appear clean and simple. BUT, clean and simple doesn’t necessarily mean sparse. Websites are not billboards. They don’t have to contain 7 words or less.

I think the main problem lies in seeing a page during the design process from the perspective of looking at the page as a whole entity.

The reality is that people using that page are not taking a 50,000 foot view of it…they are on a mission to accomplish something and they have blinders on to everything else that is irrelevant to them. Couldn’t everything else be seen as visual clutter? Yes, but only if the page is designed poorly. You CAN design a good page with a lot of information that does not have visual clutter.

That is the precise reason you hire specialists in user experience and design. If everyone only had one user task on their page like Google, you wouldn’t need anyone to design it. It’s pretty easy to put a search field in the middle of the page and place a button near it.

What is challenging is creating a page that meets the needs of a wide variety of users and still makes each one feel like they clearly and easily accomplished their goals…all the while being aesthetically pleasing and reflecting the brand message.

If they are doing their job well, the UE and Graphic designers are using proven design principles to group, title and visually separate like items in such a way that users can easily pick up a scent as to where to go next. Jared Spool, who coined the concept of scent, has proven many times that what makes a good user experience is not the amount of clicks a user must make, but whether or not they had confidence that they were on the right path. The user who can quickly and easily pick up a scent isn’t going to see the rest of the page as visual clutter, so long as the other items on the page are not distracting them from their path…even if there is a lot on the page.

If you do anything as a result of reading this blog entry, when you review the strength of the usability of a page and you think it looks cluttered, look again. Reign yourself in from that 50,000 foot view and put yourself in the context of each user type first; then decide if it is busy and creates a negative user experience. You’ll be surprised at how uncluttered the page actually is.

Back in the late 90s, it seems like using a tab format for organizing information was the hot thing. Every site seemed to be an Amazon.com copycat or they were using tabs as an attempt to mimic how physical papers might be organized into folders.

I’m not sure why the trend faded out, but tabs are definitely making a comeback. Not necessarily for primary navigation design, but as a way to consolidate a high quantity of information on one page without requiring a lot of click-through effort.

Because the new Yahoo.com and many news oriented sites are utilizing tabs, users are becoming more comfortable with this form of navigation. The exposure from these highly visible sites has started an upward swing again. In the last few wireframes our team has developed, we’ve utilized tabbing systems for:

Exposing Content on Home Pages - Content that is typically buried on back pages and represents information that users are seeking can be brought forward, exposing awareness of it without creating clutter. This gives the home page better “scent” (coined by Jared Spool) and alleviates the burden on the user to try and learn the site’s taxonomy and nomenclature to figure to find content.

Exposing Widgets & Functions – Bringing small forms and functionality that represent common tasks users will want to immediately initiate from the home page is HUGE in improving the user experience. Delta.com has done a great job of this by consolidating these functions into modules that include tabbing systems.

Product/Service Detail Pages – Consolidating detailed information about a product or service is another great use of tabs. It is a very fast and simple way to browse and scan information without having to expend the physical effort of clicking and waiting for a page refresh.

So, while tabs seem cool right now, our newest designs haven’t gone through usability tests yet. I’ll post some updates when we get some reactions from users.