Clean Up Your Administrative Debris! (Edward Tufte)

Now, I’m not exactly the prototypical Tufte fanboy, but this insanely incredible post on reinventing the desktop dropped a brilliant Tuftism that I had long forgotten: Administrative debris.

Administrative debris

Edward Tufte coined administrative debris to denote all of the elements of a UI not directly conveying the information the user really cares about. For instance, the menus and toolbars of most apps are almost entirely administrative debris. Such debris is problematic because:

* Debris takes up precious screen real estate, which would be better used to present information.
* Debris distracts the user.
* Debris requires the user to learn its layout and how to navigate in and around it.
* Debris is aesthetically displeasing and intimidating because it suggests complexity, both in terms of information clutter and conceptual difficulties.
* Debris often has to be managed by the user, thereby creating more “meta work”.

The post is absolutely worth the read. Isn’t it great living in a time of endless free awesome stuff to read? (er minus Orwell…).