Design This!

A friend who was taking a computer programming class once referred to my pretty little icons as “gooeys”. I didn’t know what a gooey was, but I had some image in my mind of a big pink piece of bubble gum that had already been chewed. She explained to me that a “Gooey” is an icon for simple users, like myself, to use in the main screen of the Mac. Or rather people that didn’t know Unix, or how to really converse with their computers. So a gooey is the techy’s word for human-computer interface design.

HCI is the basis for how simple or difficult it is to use your computer and the defining threshold between the Mac user and the PC user.

Gesaults theories are similar. Consistency, simplicity, continuity, closure, blalance, are all elements in HCI design. Avoid cluttering is a Gesault theory that gets explained in HCI as easy to navigate. Simplicity is a basic law in Gesault theory, HCI claims that you have to design for the novice user as well as the expert user.

Most of the things stated in both theories seem a little obvious, however, they are rules that are overlooked everyday.

The best design is no design.