As far as I can tell, I just coined this word. A simple google search seems to agree with me. Interactive density is the number of possible ways to interact with an application at any given moment divided by the area used to display the UI. For all of these measurements let us assume you are using a display running at 1152×864 on a 15″ display (12″x9″). If every pixel on your screen did something different it would be an interactive density of 10,000 (interactive points per square inch). If you have a single button on your display then it would be 0.009.

Let’s look at the values for a few common cases:

• Photoshop: 1.11
• Word: 0.84
• Andalib Organizer: 0.28
• Google homepage: 0.16

It would be interesting to do a study to see if there is a strong correlation between interactive density and the percentage of the population that can figure how to perform tasks using a given UI.

I think that this provides an interesting way to analyzing UI and hopefully will provide insight into the appropriate level in interactivity to provide in the UI to solve certain problems.

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