I agree that this is just one study, and that it relates to a certain scenario. In writing the article, I tried to be very careful about drawing the correct conclusions and not reading into it too much. At the same time, you are right that this kind of study can be easily abused by using the results derived to make sweaping statements. Jon called me on the title, which somewhat represents my stance.

I am right there with you regarding minimalist design. I think that it looks great and offers a pleasant user experience. And that definately has some value. In some cases (eg Google homepage) it has a ton of value. In my everyday work, I always struggle to find the sweetspot between getting value from a clean design and getting value by putting more revenue-generating action items, products, ads in the visible part of the web page. This is especially true for home pages that are the most valuable pieces of planar real estate in the world.

Unfortunately, most of our clients don’t have the kind of budgets that would allow for actually version testing. That would be great because I could definatively say that version A of the homepage is better than version B or vice versa. At the same time, having done hundreds if not thousands of pages, one develops a very good sense of what might be the optimal combination.

I like to refer to this study not to prove that we should clutter our clients’ pages to oblivion with ads, but rather to remind us that generating revenue for our clients is our number one goal, and we should not fall into blindly designing minimalist pages if ones with slightly more ads, products, etc will produce a greater net effect.

I once spoke to someone who worked for a competitor of Yahoo. They told me that you can go in the minimalist camp like Google and hope that the user loyality gained from that will outweigh the revenue lost by foregoing additional advertisements that could be placed on your pages, or you can do what Yahoo does because it seems that both models work in discrete situations.

I took a look at your site and it is beautiful. For you, it definately works because you are an interaction and visual designer. As a visual designer you can not afford to make your site cluttered with advertising and other elements as it kills your brand value. But the article is meant to challenge the notion that minimalist design should always be employed, and to compel us to really weigh the options between including more ads vis a vis reducing the number of visual elements.

It’s a long discussion with many points pro and con. If you don’t already do so, you should check out www.somerandomdude.net . He is a little more moderate in his views than I having come from a visual design background, and we haver personally had many great discussions about how our design decissions affect our clients’ revenues and the aesthetic value of their web sites. We’ll be writing a lot more on this and related topics in the upcoming months, so I urge you to check back weekly and give us your thoughts. ::Sergio

Some things I am considering after reading the post:
Make magazine. I would argue it is “busy” and has alot of “content”, but, that it uses “Minimalist methodology”. The presentation of clutter, or “elements”, is what the entire field of Communication Design as defined by the likes Basel, Cranbrook, IIT, etc. is all about! Information clutter is all about the presentation.

Take some of the ads in that same magazine. Some are “slick” and some are “ugly”. But the “format” compensates. The put all those ugly ads in one little ugly area which actually makes me look at them becuase it sticks out like sore thumb.

My “brand experience” is very positive (i would mark it a 5 on a survey). I love the content, the visualization of information, and the interaction that is achieved between print and online. The writers are experts and I compensate advertisers by their association.

Also:
I am also a fan of Post-Modern Deconstructionism as practiced by tDR. But in all that clutter, I find Minimalism. They are commisioned for interactive products.

Lastly:
MySpace is easy to use, is easy to network into, capitalizes on shared musical experiences, and most importantly, engaging as it allows user customization and personalization. If you want the onscreen clutter to represent your cluttered bedroom, you can do it. It is the personal expression of clutter that makes it appealing. I won’t get into the whole bell curve topic.

Regarding the study, it is from 2001 and although a lot of things changed in technological and business terms since then, how people cognate complex visual elements did not. The human species has not greatly evolved since then. It is true that social perceptions and expectations may have changed, but it is a lot easier to make the argument that users have become even more accustomed to cluttered pages than the converse since the average amount of ‘clutter’ has been steadily increasing over that time period.

I agree that ‘Forget Minimalist Design’ may be somewhat misleading. I guess it would have been more accurate to say ‘Don’t Be Fixate on Minimalist Design’; althought, that does not flow as well.

Like you, I would love to see a study how ‘clutter’ affects the brand value of the host site. Intuition would tell you that it should affect it adversely, but as is frequently true, there is a divergence between what users say and what they do. For example, there are a number of sites like Yahoo and MySpace that are cluttered yet have strong acquisition and retention rates. If you ever stumble upon such a study, please let me know.

Also, the study is five years old. That’s, like, 25 in Internet years.

Also, I would think the inverse is more interesting: what effect does advertising have on the brand value/customer sat of the site hosting the ads? Would you rather access information from a clean, uncluttered site or from a site saturated in advertising?

The method of carpet-bombing sites with links has proven to work very well. I would question if this has more to do with the owners of the site not knowing having any idea what the users want to click. With carpet bombing, you’re bound to hit something… I still think that there is a lot of chaos on the Craigslist type of site that could really use a designer’s touch to bring some order.

Great article once again - I’m enjoying the challenge to my thoughts and opinions.