Space & Time

Here's a common myth: people want to see as much information as possible all at once. I've noticed this thinking is particularly prevalent in enterprise software design, where workers need to rely on repeated access to information in order to perform their daily tasks. It makes sense. If people need the same information over and over each day, displaying more of that information feels like a logical way to reduce friction. In practice, though, that likely adds friction.

Neurological research suggests that people can focus in their working memory, at most, three or four chunks (Cowan 1988, 2001) and at least, just a single chunk (Garavan 1998; McElree 2001; Oberauer 2002, 2005). This suggests, perhaps counterintuitively, that as more information is presented, cognitive processing time slows. More choices, more problems.

Hick's Law (Hick 1952) further suggests that limiting the amount of visible data increases decision making velocity. Concepts such as progressive onboarding leverage this principle by splitting up information across multiple views.

So let's talk about how this relates to space. In web UI, empty space helps manage cognitive load in two ways; the space within a given view, and the space between views. Within a view, space visually distiguishes relationships and limits the overall number of visible elements.

A depiction of how empty space affects a single view.

Space is able to visualize relationships without adding any superfluous visual styling such as background colors, borders, dividers, or shadows which might otherwise distract and add cognitive load. While additional styling can be situationally useful, empty space is an optimal place to start.

This article page, for example, uses only space to separate navigation from content.

Space between views, on the other hand, speeds up cognitive processing by providing reset periods between chunks of information. On the web, this is achieved via hyperlinking.

A depiction of how empty space affects multiple views.

Physicists have long observed that large, dense objects distort and elongate time. Because of this, time slows as you travel deeper into a gravity well. There seems to also be an observable counterpart to that in human cognition. Large, complex information distorts and elongates the time required for people to comprehend or interact with it.

Rather than trying to display more data, we can focus on trying to display the right data at the right time. That's challenging to do today, but emergent technologies like generative UI might soon change the game.