Gyford's Guardian

I always love reading scripting.com. It may be a little technical for most people but Dave Winer, a pioneer of podcasting, RSS and blogging, often has incredible insights into what is going on in the world of technology and the internet. He recently keyed me into a theme which we are beginning to see with increasing frequency around the internet today, that is the argument over whether the internet is too cluttered.

The argument is that if you look at any website today, it’s filled with ads, related articles, image galleries, videos, and many other objects which distract readers from the content they’re trying to focus on. It’s hard to read a serious article when a flashing animated advertisement persistently draws your eyes away from the information you’re trying to consume.

The best articulation of the problem I have seen recently was in a post by Simon Fodden at the Slaw blog where he laments that “With online news, there’s in effect a steady stream; it falls in moment to moment, even as you’re reading; moreover, you’ve no way of judging how much there is today and when you’ve read “enough”. There is, in effect, no end to it.” There are always more related articles and distractions, causing us to be constantly distracted from from the information we really care about.

However, there are a few places on the web where this problem does not exist. The development of smartphone applications and the translation of that concept to larger touch devices like the iPad has given many of us an insight into what the web could be like without all the distractions. With many apps today, your entire experience is kept within the frame of the application ensuring that you can get that feeling of accomplishment after reading what you feel to be “enough”. You have the opportunity to fully finish an article without being distracted.

Readability

This concept of minimizing the clutter is also now being translated back to the web. Most notably, there are three interesting projects which have launched specifically to experiment with the issue of clutter on the net.

Gyford’s Guardian App

The Guardian took a different approach than fellow UK newspaper The Times by opening up their content to be used by developers through an API. This effectively allows developers to manipulate the content to be used in many different formats.

Phil Gyford, a London based developer/designer, took it upon himself to create this incredibly simple and pleasant reading experience called Today’s Guardian. Gyford stripped out all the advertising and clutter from the main Guardian site in order to provide users with an exceptional reading experience.

Readability

Readability is an experimental bookmarklet project, developed by the team at Arc90, which allow users to focus only on the text from any website they choose. It can be installed on any browser and when clicked, it displays a new page without all the clutter. This allows users to enjoy any webpage on the internet without all the distractions.

Apple's Safari 5 Reader Feature

Apple’s Reader Feature in Safari 5

Apple has recently introduced a similar feature in their new Safari 5 browser called Reader. Anytime a user is on a page which can be converted, a reader button appears in the address bar. Click the reader button and you’re presented with a text-only version of the information on the page which allows you to fully read the article without distraction.

Will we see uncluttered website content in the future of the web?

Many User Experience designers are already thinking about this issue trying to minimize the clutter online but as we transition from viewing websites only on a computer screen to an experience distributed across many different types of devices, we will have to watch closely to see how consumers react to the experiences on different interfaces.

It will be interesting to see if consumers start to enjoy the uncluttered and contained experiences found on things like smartphones and tablets. If this trend continues, it will be great to see the web begin to promote experiences dedicated to more “finishable” and easier to read content as it will allow us to skim less and focus more.