Monthly Archives: May 2011

The Gestalt Laws of Perception and how to use them in UI design

The Gestalt Laws of Perception help explain how humans perceive and make sense of visual information. As user interface designers, the laws are interesting to us because they can help us better communicate concepts and relationships that exist in our … Continue reading

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How do people look at and read pages? (Part 3 of 3)

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we looked at how readers look at pages or screens and what typical paths a reader’s eye follows when scanning visual information. When designing a software application or website, if want … Continue reading

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How do people look at and read pages? (Part 2 of 3)

In Part 1 of this series, we took a brief look at how human vision works, and we began examining how readers read blocks of text and visually scan pages and screens. To better understand how people look at visual … Continue reading

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How do people look at and read pages? (Part 1 of 3)

We’re going to start our exploration of visual design techniques by talking about composition, or how you lay out and balance the components of a page or screen. But before we get into composition techniques and principles, let’s first learn … Continue reading

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The impact of visual design on usability

It might be obvious and redundant to say this, but the usability of a software product or a website depends on its user interface. There’s probably a bunch of code and usually a database underneath, but the user doesn’t really … Continue reading

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Preview of upcoming topics for this blog

This blog is a place for me to think about and reflect on usability and UX design topics. A lot of the posts are condensed excerpts from the early draft manuscript of my upcoming book, Designing Usable Business Applications, which … Continue reading

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