Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition
by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
170 Signal-to-Noise Ratio
The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information. Good designs have high signal-to-noise ratios.
All communication involves the creation, transmission, and reception of information. During each stage of this process, the form of the information (i.e., the signal) is degraded, and extraneous information (i.e., noise) is added. Degradation reduces the amount of useful information by altering its form. Noise reduces clarity by diluting useful information with useless information. Clarity of information can be understood as the ratio of remaining signal to added noise. For example, a graph with no extraneous elements would have a high signal-to-noise ratio, whereas a graph with many extraneous elements would have a low ...
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