Testing information display

Keep the screens that display information as simple as possible. To return to the theme of this chapter, less is more. This is easy to say, and the more egregious violations of this principle are easy to spot. The trick is seeing them early enough and finding even the mildest of examples. This is a large subject and deserves a dedicated team to focus on it. Here, I will only cover some simple examples to look out for while testing, but I thoroughly recommend reading further on this fascinating subject. Within the Packt library there is Practical UX Design by Scott Farnanella or Hands-On UX Design for Developers by Elvis Canziba.

Real-world example – Too many axes

One company I worked for produced an internal tool in which graphs of network activity had eight different axes, all plotted on the same chart. Sending bandwidth, receiving bandwidth, packet loss, jitter, and latency all had lines that were superimposed over each other by default. If...