Glanceability

Glanceability   [excerpt from Lorcan Dempsey's weblog]
May 08, 2007
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001347.html

Glanceability is about enabling "users to understand information with low cognitive effort". And further: Glanceability refers to how quickly and easily the visual design conveys information after the user is paying attention to the display.

These quotes are from a paper Designing glanceable peripheral displays by Matthews, Forlizzi and Rohrbach at Berkeley. [abstract html] [full text pdf].

I went looking for further information about glanceability after I came across a mention of it in Tony Hirst's blog:

However, whilst the visual component to radio is not just using limited to scrolling liveText displays, nor does it mean moving wholesale into television: the key is to support glanceability, a beautifully evocative word referring to the ability to look at a screen and capture the information you require at a glance. [OUseful Info: Learnin' from Virgin] 

Broadly speaking, it seems to me that effective ranking, for example, supports glanceability, as folks will focus in on top results and may forego individually inspecting each member of a result set. And of course, one of the issues with library websites is that they have low glanceability: they require quite a bit of cognitive effort to figure out what is available where as they present a...