Evaluating usability of screen designs with layout complexity

This paper presents work-in-progress in assessing the usefulness of the layout complexity metric in evaluating the usability of different screen designs. An application "Launcher" was developed in Visual Basic that calculated complexity and collected usability data. Seven subjects provided some evidence that complexity could be of benefit to the screen designer. However, though Launcher proved useful in collecting data, some problems needed to be overcome, namely more concise data collection and a better method for building screens, before more data can be collected