Information Design Journal - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2016

Text designers are likely to benefit from guidance on how to use typographic differentiation for emphasis. Three experiments use purposely-designed fonts to explore the size and nature of differences in the stylistic characteristics of fonts (weight, width, contrast, italic) which affect letter identification. Results indicate that words set in bold and expanded fonts, when alternated with words set in a Neutral test font, may impair performance, whereas changing to italic does not. Possible explanations are explored through measuring the physical and perceptual similarities of the test fonts.

Operators in highly automated control rooms are said to be constantly bored, and boredom is an emotional state that can have economic and environmental consequences. This article presents insights into users’ emotions and their role in the design of control rooms. The study focused on the users’ experience in two control rooms, where operators explored their emotions in relation to a situation, object, place, or action. Based on the results of the study and previous research, this article examines control room’s information design and makes recommendations on how it might be given a tangible and ambient form.

Bamboo huts have been proposed as a low-cost housing solution in places like India, the Far East and South America. Successful building is strongly linked to the end-user’s ability to interpret and execute their assembly instructions correctly. This article reports a case study in which the planning of the structure of the instructions was carried out to decrease complexity and increase effectiveness so that the assembly could be interpreted and executed correctly by participants. A diagnostic test to assess their suitability was conducted. The results provided insight into the way in which end-users dealt with ambiguity and intrinsic cognitive load, and their preferences for sub-assemblies, action, colored diagrams and self-auditing steps.

User manuals often include stylized line drawings to enable accurate and efficient task execution. This study reports the results of an empirical test which aimed at answering the question whether the amount of visual detail in such line drawings affects users’ performance. Results indicate that manuals containing illustrations with optimal amount of detail from a graphic designer’s point of view lead to significantly faster task execution compared to illustrations with the amount of detail beyond or below that level. Age was not a factor here, which suggests that optimizing the amount of detail in line drawings supports younger and older users alike.