Information Design Journal - Volume 8, Issue 2, 1995

Solid user interfaces are the key to many of the electronic products which people use in their everyday personal and working lives: domestic and consumer equipment, telephones, ticket machines, measuring and metering devices and so on. Despite their prevalence they have received relatively little research attention compared to the graphical user interfaces of computing systems, and are rarely considered as a class. This paper identifies the characteristics of SU Is that can help or constrain peoples' interactions with products. It highlights techniques for analysis, design and testing required to ensure that solid user interfaces are informative and easy to use.

Where full-colour monitors are used for information displays, the use of colour must take into account ergonomic, perceptual, cognitive and aesthetic factors. Air traffic control displays are a safety-critical application where it is essential that colour should not be used inappropriately. This paper describes an approach to the use of colour for  displays whereby the objects on the display are assigned to a series of conceptual layers which are in turn represented as visual layers. Background map features are shown as opaque infills, overlaid with transparent infills for overlapping areas; alphanumeric labels in the foreground are shown in black, each with an attached infill to ensure good legibility and effective colour coding. Colour palettes are provided for each layer so that the display designer has flexibility but can be confident that the display will be free of colour illusions and ambiguities. The resulting displays can be used in normal office lighting. (The work was undertaken for the Chief Scientist's Division of the National Air Traffic Services, part of the UK Civil Aviation Authority.)

This article is about encounters between electronic publishing and typography, seen through the lens of one issue: decisions about ending lines in typeset text. Computer scientists working in electronic publishing have long pressed typographers to explain the thinking behind their practice. But craft knowledge, represented by typographers, has so far largely remained mute.An apparently minor issue in typographic decision-making -whether to typeset text in justified or unjustified mode -reveals some of the situated reasoning which informs reflective design practice. The following questions are surveyed: What are the characteristics of unjustified setting? For what purpose is it used? How effective is it? How is it done in practice? Why has it been a subject of argument among typographers? Examining these questions tells something about the intricacy of typographic decision-making, and is a forcible reminder of the materiality of designing.

Electronic publishers can be simply but plausibly divided into 'stylists' and 'structuralists'. Structured document formatting systems are used widely. Implicitly, they present a particular and potentially attractive view of documents, where form and content are divorced. This view also suggests that authors simply write, while the formatting software does the work of rendering he structured text into a suitable visual form.This paper informally examines some of the forces which encouraged the development of such systems (in particular TeX/LaTeX), and of such a view. Examples are cited which contest the view that form and content can be separated completely, and which suggest that the world of documents and formatting is altogether more demanding.

Intriguing phenomena occur when experts use computer-assisted design tools in electronics. It can be seen that tools must support information access, 'escape from formalism', 'secondary notation', and differences between individual users. This paper explores a new account for the data, relying on the idea of graphical implicature, generalised from Grice's conversational implicature. All communicative artefacts carry implicatures, significance beyond their literal meaning. The important thing is to control them systematically, so that a graphic avoids unwanted implicatures, and carries the desired ones. Whether or not the current account is useful has broader significance. If it is useful, it may prove possible to predict and explain the properties of complex graphical representations, by borrowing formal techniques from natural language pragmatics.

This paper reports the results of a survey of 1500 US graphic designers. Respondents provided information about their levels of involvement with project-related information gathering and analysis, planning, and end-user evaluation. While there are significant levels of involvement in some of these activities, comments made by respondents reveal that involvement with information gathering and analysis, planning, and end-user evaluation is mostly informal. That is, they are often conducted without a formal methodology, and are often not mentioned in project proposals and other related documents.This suggests an opportunity for graphic designers to adopt a formal method for incorporating information gathering and analysis, planning, and end-user evaluation in their design processes. This could allow graphic designers to construct a process comparable to more respected professions, and should promote design solutions geared more closely to the needs of audiences. There is still much room for improvement in the areas of information gathering and analysis, planning, and end-user evaluation in the practice of graphic design.