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Berlin-based artificial intelligence startup EyeQuant has developed a tool that will automatically judge how clean the design of your website is.

The system was developed by teaching a computer to look at websites in the same way a human might. EyeQuant, founded by a team of neuroscientists, was building on work it had done on an Eye-Tracking tool that predicts how people will look at websites to create an inexpensive heat map. The service provides an inexpensive alternative to eye-tracking studies and is used by companies such as Google.


We believe that the best design is the most simple design you can come up with Fabian Stelzer, EyeQuant

The Clarity tool was developed using largescale online experiments with human beings (more than 1,000), who were quizzed on the cleanness and elegance of different designs. This was combined with a list of key image features such as colour contrast, noise, entropy, luminance and contours in a machine learning process. This allowed EyeQuant to develop a tool that could predict how clear and organised a design would look to the human eye with 95 percent accuracy.

Users can enter in a URL or an image, and EyeQuant will rate the Visual Clarity of any design on a scale of 0 (chaos) to 100 (perfect). It also benchmarks results in relation to a Clarity Index of the 10,000 most visited websites in the world -- Apple's iPhone online store gets a score of 94, meaning it's in the top one percent of the most visited sites in terms of clarity. At the lower end of the scale a cluttered car website called Lingscars.com achieved 0 out of 100. The average score for the top 10,000 sites is 47, with fashion sites and simple product sites like Dropbox scoring particularly highly. "To have a good prediction like this, you need to have something that is predictable. With clarity -- how clean and clear is the design -- intersubjective variance is very low. People agree by and large about what makes design elements elegant and clean,"

EyeQuant CEO Fabian Stelzer told Wired.co.uk.


The tool is really geared towards ecommerce sites, where you need to make it as easy as possible for a custom to transact.

Text-based news sites tend to get a low score, since chunks of words are deemed cluttered. "It was trained with a lot of online shops," says Stelzer. The algorithm isn't actually looking for text, it's just looking for image features and pixels. "The way text is structured, it's picked up as something that oftentimes corresponds with clutter." "We believe that the best design is the most simple design you can come up with. If you unclutter a design and get rid of the unnecessary parts, you'll have a better website afterwards, hence you'll have a higher conversion," Stelzer added, saying that people get impatient and within one click can leave to go to a competitor site.

But doesn't this mean that all websites will end up looking the same? Stelzer says this is not the case. "The reason why websites look like each other is because on one hand companies want to stand out and be different, but users have certain expectations about where they should find stuff. 99 times out of 100 you try something crazy it won't work for users. But every now and then you come up with something truly cool and this becomes the new standard for user expectations," he explains. This means that the 1 percent of "really cool" design might not fare so well according to the Clarity Index.

However, Stelzer doesn't see the index as being prescriptive, it's more a tool to help decision making. At the moment all you get is a score, but the plan is to develop a recommendation tool suggesting what tweaks could be made to improve upon the design.


The technology itself was informed by neuroscience. Some of the team members -- including Dr Peter König and Dr Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science -- were working on attention prediction models at Caltech in order to better understand the human visual cortex. They have licensed a patent and commercialised it through EyeQuant.

EyeQuant is working on a load of other scores along these lines, one of which is a "beauty" score for websites, but is only asking western subjects. "There's a lot more intersubjective variance with beauty. It's definitely tricky, but we have a prototype version," says Stelzer. Another score could be trustworthiness -- Stelzer makes reference to an experiment where subjects were shown portrait shots of politicians and asked to rate trustworthiness and it turned out to be a good predictor or success in an election. "It's both fascinating and scary that people make these important decisions so easily," he says.

EyeQuant offers subscriptions to its service -- which includes both the eye-tracking tool and Clarity -- from £199 per month.