Designing live concerts: U2 show how it's done

If you're a designer (or just into good design) and a music fan, I'd like to recommend the book U2 Show.  Despite the uninspired and nondescript title, this is a book about how the various U2 tours were designed -- from Boy all the way through Elevation.  The book explains the countless hours that go into stage design, lighting design, sound & speaker stack design, and a whole bunch of other areas (and it has some great photos too).  I really enjoyed the window this book provides into what goes into the design of a large rock concert, and it showed me again that basic principles of good design translate to all media forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from tour manager Willie Williams.  First, on how the PopMart tour came into being:

There was also a very direct (and very rare) brief to me that this tour would be ‘design-led’, rather than being intimidated by scale or logistics.  Having proved to themselves and to the world with ZooTV that, in terms of what can be toured, ‘anything is possible’, U2 were of a mind that the only limits to be placed on the creative ambitions of this tour were to be financial ones.

On the impossible design requirements given to the sound engineers:

Mark Fisher’s frustration with years of stage design constrained by traditional loudspeaker stacks led him to propose that we should keep the huge video screen free from clutter by placing the entire sound system in one central ball.  Most sound engineers would have resigned on the spot, but Joe O’Herlihy rose to the challenge of mixing a live show through what would essentially be a mono PA.

I like how they talk about the huge differences between the PopMart tour and the Elevation tour:

After the broad, churchy strokes of the Lovetown show and the sensory assault of Zoo TV and the garish, high-concept japery of PopMart, here are U2 playing their songs hard, straight and in your face.

It goes into detail on the simplicity of the Elevation stage and lighting design:

Video is not something that can simply be added to a show, a fact that is the downfall of many otherwise potentially interesting stage productions. We are so conditioned to look at television that moving camera pictures automatically become the focus of attention.

Because of this they went with what they call "Unmediated iMag", which means that the screens showing the band members will be static cameras, and showing everything in black-and-white to avoid distraction from what is happening on stage:

This proves once again what I have always believed to be the single most important purpose of visual design: to allow the content  to shine through elegantly, without distraction.  Pick up this book at Amazon if you're interested -- with more than just pretty pictures it brings a great design perspective to the enormous live concert industry.

Visual design clutter index for web pages

I'm currently working on a project where we're trying to come up with way to establish a visual design "clutter index."  The goal is to see if there is some threshold beyond which web page clutter impacts actual business metrics like conversion and click-through rates.  The challenges are widespread of course, and mainly focused on the following 3 areas:

• The definition and measurement of clutter.  There are a variety of ways to measure clutter on pages, ranging from the completely objective (e.g., % of white space on a page) to completely subjective (e.g., how do users rate the page on a clean vs. cluttered scale). 
• The definition of conversion.  Since some pages on an e-commerce web site are revenue-generating, and others aren't, an important question is how you define conversion.  For revenue-generating pages (e.g., pages with a "checkout now" button) this is easy -- did the page result in a sale.  For other pages, like product information pages, this measure won't work, so some other measure of engagement with the page becomes necessary.
• Controlling for other influencing factors.  In conjunction with to first 2 points comes the problem of causality vs. correlation.  Assuming you have your definitions of clutter and conversion nailed down, how can you be sure any changes you see in conversion is caused by clutter (causal relationship), and not some other factor you are not accounting for (there's correlation but no causal relationship).

The way to go about it is to take as many measurements of clutter as you can, throw it into a model with a variety of conversion metrics, and see what comes out.  You also have to find a way to account for other influencing factors so that you can control for that in your model.  Easy, right?  Ok, so there are a lot of open issues, but they're definitely not insurmountable.  I also believe it's a worthy pursuit, the hypothesis being that there are clear business reasons for keeping designs and interfaces simple. 

And apparently we're not the only ones thinking about this...  Ruth Rosenholtz and her colleagues at MIT recently wrote a paper (Measuring Visual Clutter) where they seem to have developed what they call a "clutter detector" for a variety of interfaces, mostly offline (desk clutter, map clutter, etc.).  They describe some of their challenges in doing this as follows:

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter.

On the issue of subjective measures of clutter:

Although there was a fair bit of disagreement among the people being tested about what constituted clutter, when the researchers compared results from their clutter measure to those of their human subjects, they found a good correlation.

I'm still digesting the paper, but it's a fascinating read so definitely check it out.  Thoughts on how to approach this for e-commerce web pages are more than welcome by leaving a comment or emailing me at rian at ux-sa dot com.