Tutorial #3

Designing Visual Interfaces: How to Create Communication-Oriented Solutions

Kevin E. Mullet, Macromedia

Sunday, April 14, full-day

Benefits

You will learn a set of practical visual design techniques for creating graphical user interfaces and information displays. You will learn several core competencies or "tricks of the trade" from the discipline of visual design.

Origins

An earlier version of this tutorial was presented with Darrell Sano at InterCHI'93 and CHI'94 where it received enthusiastic responses from participants. It has been updated for CHI 96.

Features

elegance and simplicity as central components of aesthetic evaluation
the interrelationship of scale, contrast, and proportion to produce harmonious effects
use of organization and visual structure to provide landmarks to help users understand a product
techniques for basic screen layout
use of modularity and systems of organization to bring regularity and structure to the user's experience
representational and abstract images
cultural differences in the perception and interpretation of images
developing a visual style that is distinct, recognizable, and appropriate

Audience

Anyone without formal training in visual design who is responsible for designing, specifying, implementing, or managing the visual appearance of a graphical user interface or information display. Graphic designers will be familiar with the techniques described here, but will find the application to user interface design to be of interest.

Presentation

Lecture and discussion address familiar problems in real-world product development. Examples, both good and bad, from standard GUIs illustrate the problems and solutions for visual design. You will participate in hands-on exercises to try out the techniques covered in the tutorial.

Instructor

Kevin Mullet is a Human Interface Engineer at Macromedia, where he is designing an integrated authoring environment for interactive digital media. He has seven years experience designing interfaces for many different platforms, working previously at Sun Microsystems, SunSoft, Inc., SunPro, and Aaron Marcus + Associates. He is co-author of the book, "Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication-Oriented Techniques" (Prentice-Hall, 1994).