Clutter

Despite what my desk would have you believe, I don’t actually like clutter. Especially visual clutter. At work I’m very good at taking documentation and figuring out why it doesn’t do the job. I can tell where a person's gaze is drawn, how they skip steps or miss words. Any documentation I produce might look bare but it is incredibly functional and very powerful.

This preference for clean written material is one of the reasons that I find map reading so hard. Charts are so cluttered, especially the VNC, the detail blurs in my head. I can’t pick out the key features I need to until someone points them out to me. If I look away, my eyes don’t automatically go back to the same spot, so it takes me time to locate where I was , let alone where I am.

The same thing happens mentally when I look at the flight planning form (here if you are curious). Everything in Canada is bilingual, all official forms in French and English. It doubles the amount of words on the page, half of them are superfluous. It crowds my vision and makes my head hurt.