Designing Visual Interfaces

by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano

Book review by Raghu Kolli

The expertise of graphic designers is not very well understood in the software community. Only a small fraction of the commercial software development community (mostly the big players) hire the services of graphic designers and/or human interface designers. Though developments like World Wide Web has spawned off a sudden demand for graphic design services, the bulk of Web pages or graphical user interfaces for that matter, are in reality designed by the technical team members. Graphic design is often viewed as an `artistic' profession that provides a quick face-lift to make software look `user-friendly'. Generally speaking, the software engineering community seldom appreciated nor acknowledged the fact that certain sound visual principles govern the graphic design of user interfaces.

In this context, a much required book titled `Designing Visual Interfaces' by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano describes `a number of important design rules and techniques internalised by every visual designer through coursework and studio experience'. Drawing heavily from the traditional print media, the authors identify and apply several visual communication principles to graphical user interfaces of computer software. While the techniques may not be entirely new to most graphic designers, their application to computer software will provide an interesting insight, considering the generous number (254) of illustrative screen pictures used throughout the book.

The field of human computer interaction is littered with dozens of books. At least half of them contain the word `design' in their titles, but alas, many of them do not even have any pictures or good examples of contemporary user interfaces. Moreover, the word `design' has been differently interpreted depending on the background of authors to mean program code design or `look-and-feel' design. Mullet and Sano coming from a background of industrial design and graphic design respectively, have done much justice in presenting user interface design from the less known visual communication perspective. Both of them are experienced user interface designers having worked at Sun (Mullet now works at Macromedia and Sano works at Netscape) on a number of projects and the book was borne out of the tutorials they conducted at CHI and other conferences since 1993.

A professional faced with the task of designing user interfaces for computer software has many aspects to consider from a communication point of view according to Mullet and Sano. All the elements in the design must be unified to produce a coherent whole. Important elements must be clear and well contrasted against others but must be harmonious with each other. The display elements must be structured by grouping together related ones and creating a visual hierarchy of importance to reflect the relationships between elements and groups while maintaining a pleasing balance in the composition. Visual elements should be based on a flexible grid so that different screens have a consistent look. While visual images convey information quickly, care must be taken in their abstraction giving due consideration to the cultural context in which the images will be interpreted. For maintaining a graphic style, the forms must be distinctive, integrated, appropriate and comprehensive enough to generalise across a range of design situations.

To realise these basic principles of design, the authors offer a number of techniques which are termed as: reduction, regularisation, alignment, optical adjustment, repetition, selection, refinement, generalisation and so on, to name a few. Each technique is described with examples and summarised into a step by step process. For example, the steps suggested for extracting an abstract image from an original image through the refinement technique reads as follows:

Determine the appropriate level of abstraction for your image set, based on subject matter, audience, and display resolution.
Begin with an image seen from the viewpoint including the most characteristic contours. The source can be a photo-graph, drawing, or sketch of the object.
Use the trace overlay technique to rapidly develop a series of drawings from the initial image. Omit details until only the most essential or characteristic elements remain. Experiment with different combinations of elements to identify those that best characterise the object

and so on.

Though these may sound like steps off a do-it-yourself manual, the authors have taken care to include a brief theoretical background at the beginning of each chapter covering Jacques Bertin's survey of visual variables, Gestalt theory and Charles Pierce's semiotics. The book is well researched and the authors provide a thorough criticism of common errors found in user interfaces from every day software for Macintosh, Windows, UNIX and other platforms through numerous examples.

The title `Designing visual interfaces' is somewhat misleading as the book entirely omits the navigational and dynamic aspects that are integral part of visual interaction design of user interfaces. In fact, the authors do even mention the design process of user interfaces or clarify the roles of several visual designers (graphic designer, interaction designer, industrial designer, communication designer) in the software development team. Considering the fact that the authors are primarily reaching out to the software engineering community, a short description of the role of a designer and the design methodology would have been valuable. In that sense, a more appropriate title for the book would be `Graphic design for user interfaces' as it only covers principles for design of static dialogue boxes, icons and windows layout. Though the book itself is tightly structured and sensitively designed in terms of typography and layout, the content lacks integration and the many individual principles and techniques remain as discreet entities. In other words, each topic can be read independent of each other, instead of a linear fashion -- chapter by chapter from beginning till end. Perhaps, an encyclopaedia like structure may have been more appropriate to make the content readily accessible.

Informative books like this are indeed rare and `Designing Visual Interfaces' certainly joins the ranks of classic design books like Edward Tufte's `The Visual Display of Quantitative Information'. Though it is unlikely to guide a practising graphic designer through an interface design project, it certainly provides some general useful insights. A few years down the line, it will be a valuable historical reference of screen graphics covering the late eighties and early nineties.

Designing Visual Interfaces -- Communication Oriented Techniques by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano SunSoft Press/Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-303389-9, 1995, 273 pages, $46 http://www.sun.com/cgi-bin/show?smi/ssoftpress/books/Mullet/Mullet.html

Reviewer's Address: Delft University of Technology Faculty of Industrial Design Eng. Jaffalaan 9, 2628 BX Delft The Netherlands T: +31 15 781438 r.kolli@io.tudelft.nl

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Vol.28 No.2, April 1996
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