Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

• Information Density and Mobile Devices Posted Monday, November 16, 2009 Jim Garretson 0 Comments

  Information density isn’t a glamorous user interface design metric, but it’s critical to quick and effective communication. In this post I’m going to talk a bit about what information density is, why it’s important, and how we’re intending to use it to our advantage on mobile devices.

  Briefly, information density is the comparison of the size of an interface to the amount of information it provides. When using a computer the key information density question is, how much can you learn from the screen of information in front of you? Answering this question is more complicated than it seems: you can adjust a spreadsheet to have a smaller font size (so that more rows fit onscreen), but does that really make the data more understandable? Probably not. Oftentimes the best way to make sense of data is to convert it into a different form - sort it, filter it, or create an information graphic to present it visually. If you take the graphical route, though, the problem becomes finding the minimum size necessary to show what you want to show.

  The size of an interface on a computer screen is generally measured in pixels, and we say that the number of pixels on the entire screen is the screen’s resolution. Below is a quick comparison of a few common screen resolutions; chances are, the computer you’re using right now is running at one of these resolutions. 640x480 means that the screen has 640 pixels horizontally and 480 vertically.

  
  1. A few common computer screen resolutions.
  

  
  Over the last fifteen years the number of pixels available on most users’ screens has expanded dramatically. In 1995, Windows 95 was most commonly run at a resolution of 640x480. This was upgraded to 800x600 with Windows XP in 2001, and today is usually 1024x768 or higher (sometimes much higher). This trend of more and more pixels becoming available to user interfaces has largely kept the pressure off of designers - presenting information compactly is less critical when there’s plenty of screen space available to show things.

  Here, though, is a comparison of common mobile device screen resolutions:

  
  2. A few common mobile device resolutions.

  

  
  In terms of pixels available, you can see that we’re back to pre-Windows 95 levels. Providing information compactly becomes critical when you’re trying to provide a great experience on a mobile device. To that end, our iPhone app displays our customers’ email statistics graphically as well as numerically:

  
  3. Constant Contact QuickView for iPhone displaying email statistics.
  

  
  The pie chart graphic is intended to provide a more easily understandable representation of the email’s statistics. Although on this page we display the information both graphically and numerically, hopefully you agree that the pie graph gives a more compact at-a-glance representation.

  Providing information both numerically and graphically is great, but we’re not finished yet. Down the road, once you understand the graph and see what it represents, we can hide the numerical display, reclaim the screen space we’ve gained, and use it to provide additional information at a similarly high density. Ultimately, we may be able to provide a complete view of an email’s status on one screen. Here’s a concept of a high information density display on an iPhone:

  
  4. High information density concept.
  

  
  Again, that’s just a concept, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of why carefully considering information density is so important on a mobile device. The current QuickView application provides our customers with insight into their emails’ statistics in a more convenient manner than logging on to our web site. Constant Contact Labs will continue to explore more effective and convenient ways to provide these types of insight, and we’re going to make high information density one of our secret weapons as we do.

   

  The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms

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  Interface Design • Iphone • Mobile
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