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Designing Look and Feel

The commonly accepted wisdom of the postMacintosh era is that graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, are better than characterbased user interfaces. However, although there are certainly GUI programs that dazzle us with their ease of use and their look and feel, most GUI programs still irritate and annoy us in spite of their graphical nature. It’s easy enough, so it seems, to create a program with a graphical user interface that has a difficultyofuse on par with a commandline Unix application. Why is this the case?

To find an answer to this question, we need to better understand the role of visual design in the creation of user interfaces.

Visual Art versus Visual Design

Practitioners of visual art and practitioners of visual design share a visual medium. Each must be skilled and knowledgeable about that medium, but there the similarity ends. The goal of the artist is to produce an observable artifact that provokes an aesthetic response. Art is thus a means of selfexpression on topics of emotional or intellectual concern to the artist, and sometimes, to society at large. Few constraints are imposed on the artist; and the more singular and unique the product of the artist’s exertions, the more highly it is valued. Designers, on the other hand, create artifacts that meet the goals of people other than themselves. Whereas the concern of contemporary artists is primarily expression of ideas or emotions, visual designers, as Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano note in their excellent book Designing Visual Interfaces (1995), “are concerned with finding the representation best suited to the communication of some specific information.” Visual interface designers, moreover, are concerned with finding the representation best suited to communicating the behavior of the software that they are designing. .

Graphic Design and Visual Interface Design

Design of user interfaces does not entirely exclude aesthetic concerns, but rather it places such’ concerns within the constraints of a functional framework. Visual design in an interface context thus requires several related skills, depending on the scope of the interface in question. Any designer working on interfaces needs to understand the basics: color, typography, form, and composition. However, designers working on interfaces also need some understanding of interaction the behavior of the software, as well. It is rare to find visual designers with an even balance of these skills, although both types of visual perspectives are requiredforatruly successfulinteractivedesign

Graphic design and user interfaces

Graphic design is a discipline that has, until the last twenty years or so, been dominated by the medium of print, as applied to packaging, advertising, and document design. Oldschool graphic designers are uncomfortable designing in a digital medium and are unused to dealing with graphics at the pixel level, a requirement for most interfacedesign issues. However, a new breed of graphic designers has been trained in digital media and quite successfully applies the concepts of graphic design to the new, pixilated medium.

Graphic designers typically have a strong understanding of visual principles and a weaker understanding of concepts surrounding software behavior and interaction over time. Talented, digitallyfluent graphic designers excel at providing the sort of rich, clean, visually consistent, aesthetically pleasing, and exciting interfaces we see in Windows XP, Mac OS X,andsomeofthemorevisually sophisticatedcomputergameinterfacesandconsumeroriented applications. These designers excel at creating beautiful and appropriate surfaces of the interface and are also responsible for the interweaving of corporate branding into software look and feel. For them, design is first about legibility and readability of information, then about tone, style, and framework that communicate a brand, and finally about communicating behavior through affordances.

Visual interface design and visual information design

Visual interface designers share some of the skills of graphic designers, but they focus more on the organizational aspects of the design and the way in which affordances communicate behavior to users. Although graphic designers are more adept at defining the syntax of the visual design— what it looks like — visual interface designers are more knowledgeable about principles of interaction. Typically, they focus on how to match the visual structure of the interface to the logical structure of both the user’s and the program’s behavior. Visual interface designers are also concerned with communication of program states to the user and with cognitive issues surrounding user perception of functions (layout, grids, figureground issues, and so on). Visual information designers fulfill a similar role regarding content and navigation rather than more interactive functions. Their role is particularly important in Web design, where content often outweighs function. Their primary focus tends to be on controlling information hierarchy through the use of visual language. Visual information designers work closely with information architects, just as visual interface designers work closely with interaction designers,

Industrial design

Although it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss industrial design issues in any depth, as interactive appliances and handheld devices become widespread, industrial design is playing an evergrowing role in the creation of new interactive products. Much like the difference in skills between graphic designers and visual interface and information designers, there is a similar split among the ranks of industrial designers. Some are more adept at the creation of arresting and appropriate shapes and skins of objects, whereas others’ talents lie more in the logical and ergonomic mapping of physical controls in a manner that matches user behaviors and communicates device behaviors. As more physical artifacts become softwareenabled and sport sophisticated visual displays, it will become more important that interaction designers, industrial designers, and visual designers of all flavors work closely together to produce usable products.