22 Dec 2006 0953H

Information design: less is more, only show more when I need it

It’s funny where you learn lessons about designing information. I was playing GRAW the other night and there’s a sequence when you’re flying above Zocalo Plaza in Mexico City, gunning down soldiers on rooftops trying to bring your bird down. Now when you do this normally, there’s so much detail whizzing by (and you’re being shot at) that your accuracy really really sucks. How to cope? Enter the infrared goggles. The IR goggles are funny like that. Unlike their GR1/GR2 cousins, these goggles work day or night. In this case, in the middle of the day, you can use the goggles to filter out all unnecessary information and the targets come up nice and bright while the background stays dark and formless. As a result, my accuracy went up 3 to 4 times what it would be normally. Less really is more in this case. Now, having said all that, there are times when you do need more detail, zooming in on a target for the headshot, and should have the flexibility to turn that on. So, if we can condense this into a principle: the bare bones mode is default, show only the information people need, but enable less or more detail on demand, so long as the user is told what they have at their disposal.

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