Are there any "rules" or recommendations in UX Design for displaying a lot of data on a webpage? Or how to select the most needed information to display data?
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You might look at sites similar to yours. Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest all show tons of information on a single page. Or are you doing something like Amazon, which also shows a lot of info on a single product-detail page. Or are you doing something like an analytics site?– Ken MohnkernCommented Nov 12, 2015 at 14:02
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1Also, there is a question about "too much data" on the site: ux.stackexchange.com/questions/1459/…– JeromeRCommented Nov 12, 2015 at 14:03
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Thanks for your answers. I often get jobs where i have to display a lot of content on one page. Sometimes the content types are products of a company, sometimes it's just a lot of text (articles etc). Given that it's very difficult to get a clean look and work with whitespaces to separate the content for a better user experience. I know the 10 usability rules of jakob nielsen but it's not helping for a bigger amount of content. I just wanted to know if somebody made up some good rules for these problems.– flumingoCommented Nov 12, 2015 at 14:18
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I would say that if there was a rule, that it would be not to display too much information on a single page (it leads to other debates like whether you should paginate or scroll continuously as well), and there are always ways to optimize the content on a page so that it is suitable for scanning and reading. Putting too much content on a page will prevent the application of most good design practices. The only exception might be if you want to deliberately create the appearance of having a lot of content (e.g. advertising or listing site), but it doesn't seem to improve the user experience.– Michael Lai ♦Commented Oct 13, 2019 at 22:29
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3 Answers
Much of the time, it's most useful to summarize your data into visuals and higher-level categories that allow you to drill down to the specific data. This is why infographics are so powerful and why sites like mint.com are loved.
Categorizing your data in mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) ways will also eliminate redundancies in what you're displaying while also making sure what is displayed is thorough. For example, make sure to segment your data into say, 3-5 categories, but also provide an "Other" category that can catch anything that may not apply (this works well so long as the Other category is relatively small).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECE_principle
You could then choose to present the most often clicked categories above the fold.
answered Nov 13, 2015 at 0:11
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Thank you for your answer :). I definitely learned something new today.– flumingoCommented Nov 13, 2015 at 14:08
A quick google turns up this article: 14 Beautiful Content-Heavy Websites for Inspiration
It offers several principles, reworded here:
White space – allow the content (and your visitors’ eyes) room to breathe
Boxes, borders & graphical planes – Segment the information into visual categories
Intuitive search method – Let your users jump straight to the info they need
Grids – Although not always necessary for comprehension, keeping content within a rigid, consistent structure helps reduce the effort required to process it
Strong information hierarchy – Establish a consistent design language using content types (blurbs, excerpts, call to actions)
Visual hierarchy – The relative importance of different content areas and elements can be visually implied in many ways, ranging from typographic treatments (headlines, sub-headings, pull-quotes, etc.), to image sizes and saturation, placement, etc.
I would add one more important thing that ties into the hierarchical points.
User-Centric Content Decisions - Try as best you can, via user testing and analytics, to determine what content users really want/need and use that information to influence related decisions.
answered Nov 12, 2015 at 15:12
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Thank you for your answer. Since i'm a developer, most of the time i don't know how to reach information about ux, since it's rarely discussed in computer science (gladly it's slowly changing). Your information are very important and precious for people like me :)– flumingoCommented Apr 13, 2016 at 12:06
Design principle: Organizing information https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-organizing-information-343a7ef936a8
UX Design Guidelines For Content Heavy UI https://theuxblog.com/blog/design-guidelines-for-content-heavy-ui
How to strategically plan for data-heavy UX design https://getflywheel.com/layout/plan-data-heavy-ux-design-how-to/
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2We see that you have many good references here. But please extract the relevant information (for the question) and add em to your answer. There is a high chance that links could get stale in the future. Thank you :)– KishCommented Oct 13, 2019 at 17:19