Please watch modules 20-22 and comment with your responses to any of Nick’s ‘Write on the class blog’ prompts.
8 thoughts on “Week 11 Participation Blog”
– How might knowledge of visual illusions improve design? Give an example?
Most of the designs I do on user interfaces are primarily 2D and I don’t usually use much graphics in my layouts because I am not a graphic designer. I can imagine using these visual illusions much more if I were a graphic artist. Having said that, there might be certain text or a graphic/picture that you want to emphasize. I might try to use vertical lines on the border to help draw the user’s attention to the item. Certainly, if you were doing 3D design you might use some of these illusions, or more likely you might want to correct for them, depending on what you were trying to accomplish in the UI. Perhaps if you were putting together some kind of multi-media display, then you might use these illusions. I certainly would want to confer with a graphic artist when trying to put anything fancy together. For example, when designing a logo, you might want to consider using one of the illusions to your advantage.
I am thinking that this is used a lot in games involving questions asking which size of cube is bigger or which of the figure has more area etc..
If I am using visual illusion in my design, I would definitely use it when I am conducting a quiz competition that is timed. The eyes get illusional when it has to decide between multiple things quickly in a shorter time frame.
How might knowledge of visual illusions help improve design? Give an example. One of the first things I thought of was a distance illusion. If I were to try and design a training room or a meeting room I would slightly alter the size of objects on the further end of the room to attempt to give the room some dimension. I want the user to have the experience of seeing the room and getting a sense of the scale.
So a couple of other comments that I wanted to make based on the materials presented. Along the lines of the top down suppression working to block out the second ‘the’ in the statement, scientists believe the brain utilizes context to be able to decipher words and make sense of a something even when it is horribly misspelled. When hearing about the horizontal and vertical illusion I was reminded of Piaget’s Theory of Conservation where you have two short, wider glasses and a taller, narrow glass. You can ask a child which glass has more and they will say the same, but they can watch you pour one of the small glasses into the taller glass and when you ask again they will pick the taller glass. They lack the fundamental concept of conservation so they guess incorrectly, but it is a still a neat experiment. With regard to the blindspot and driving. I have one of those ‘smart cars’ that are nearly self-driving with the lane assist, blindspot monitoring, speed sensing cruise control. I think it’s fabulous and I can’t imagine driving without it now. I think that more and more cars will be adding this type of technology and we are not that far off from a truly self driving car. Not sure anyone outside of the 1% will be able to afford it, but it will be something.
Dan, we should have interviewed you for our consumer profile – we are working with smart car features. I will be looking forward to your feedback on our storyboards! 🙂
Module 22:
How might knowledge of visual illusions help improve design? Give an example.
My thoughts went directly to aesthetics. All my systems are all text based, so visual design is not something we take widely into consideration. But, we do look at where text boxes are placed and how the page is aligned to the rest of the system. When I am thinking of these illusions, I am thinking about the fact that my developers are programming things to be exactly equal, but with horizontal vertical illusion in play, it can cause the page to look less than pleasing. Several times I have sent the developers mock ups, where I have had move things on the page to make them more appropriate to the lines and sections on the page, even though it meant they no longer followed previously set guidelines.
Visual illusions can be important to make sure the user perceives something the way a designer wants. One example could be in a video game. Particularly on older, 8-bit video games, where resolution is severely limited, it could be difficult to give 3D effects since there weren’t enough pixels or colors for things like shadows. One way a 3D effect could be achieved was to have small object moving slowly across the screen, and slightly larger objects moving more quickly across the screen. This gives the effect that there is a motion effect, and the objects are in the background. The smaller, slower moving objects are perceived as being farther away than the larger, faster objects.
How might knowledge of visual illusions improve design? Give an example.
From an engineering aspect, a valuable aspect of visual illusions could be reducing processing and amount of design needed to have a pleasing UI. I am currently renovating a house, and I see this effect exactly from putting up drywall. The goal when mudding the drywall is not to make a perfectly flat surface, that would waste a huge amount of time. Instead, because of how vision works, the goal is just to spread out uneven surfaces to a long distance instead of having a sharp incline/decline. Doing this makes it so that the height difference does not cast a shadow, so is not perceptible. Correct lighting can also help, as if there is no light thrown at a sharp angle to the surface, then shadows cannot be cast. These visual illusions reduce material use and manpower needed. These same ideas can be used for any human computer interaction, where the system does not need to be perfect, just needs to be designed in a way that humans cannot perceive issues. An example of this is the refresh rates of screens. Images on screens are not persistent, and are only updated at a certain frequency. Humans see a persistent image because the frequency is higher than they can perceive the change. There is no need to waste resources updating faster, because there is no benefit.
Another potential benefit in understanding visual illusions is the potential that will be available with the availability of virtual reality. As the video showed, movement at the peripheral of the eye “adds” more information. This effect could be used when the system wants to draw the users gaze in a particular direction in an unobtrusive way. This may feel more natural that having a huge arrow in the center of the screen pointing in the direction they want the user to look. This is particularly important in the aspect in the lecture in the discussion of screen size. As screens get bigger, or are all encompassing in the VR example, utilizing peripheral vision will be much more important as not all of the information can possibly be in the users center of vision.
I realize this is a bit late, but better than not at all…
Regarding the prompt for examples where colorblindness might pose an issue, certainly it would be a factor in any visual interface where color is used as an indicator of particular classes, categories, or status of object or links. Red and green are very recognizable in terms of their semantic symbolism (stop/go) but using these to signal the status or attributes of items on screen would be worse than useless to someone with red-green colorblindness. In fact it would be worse than useless, as it might actually lead to these opposites being confused with one another. So color coding things on screen might really become an issue if this information isn’t redundant elsewhere. Ideally, color coding would be something the user could set for themselves so that the colors are visually distinct and relevant to the individual.
Regarding the request for ideas on what other kinds of testing can be more effective for driving exams besides acuity testing, I thought one practical test might be to show them images with pertinent signs in the periphery, and see if they are recognized. Especially for the example of getting onto a highway exit ramp in the wrong direction, which seems to be a big issue in rural areas, or yield signs, pedestrian warnings, etc.
For the prompt in module 22 regarding optical illusions:
We can see that optical illusions are used all the time in advertising to give the illusion that items are bigger or heavier or more substantial than they actually are, or to de-emphasize attributes that might turn people off, or just to draw your eye to some emotion-grabbing symbolism. Designers in these cases are taking advantage leveraging the way we perceive size, distance, symmetry, ambiguous symbolism, and other top-down subjectivities in order to focus our attention on certain aspects of an image and to create a more attractive perception of their product. A car interior looks more spacious if the driver is the size of a horse racing jockey, and the photos of many apartment listings are taken with wide angle lenses and from exactly the right perspective to make the place appear a lot bigger than it is.
– How might knowledge of visual illusions improve design? Give an example?
Most of the designs I do on user interfaces are primarily 2D and I don’t usually use much graphics in my layouts because I am not a graphic designer. I can imagine using these visual illusions much more if I were a graphic artist. Having said that, there might be certain text or a graphic/picture that you want to emphasize. I might try to use vertical lines on the border to help draw the user’s attention to the item. Certainly, if you were doing 3D design you might use some of these illusions, or more likely you might want to correct for them, depending on what you were trying to accomplish in the UI. Perhaps if you were putting together some kind of multi-media display, then you might use these illusions. I certainly would want to confer with a graphic artist when trying to put anything fancy together. For example, when designing a logo, you might want to consider using one of the illusions to your advantage.
Visual illusion in design.
I am thinking that this is used a lot in games involving questions asking which size of cube is bigger or which of the figure has more area etc..
If I am using visual illusion in my design, I would definitely use it when I am conducting a quiz competition that is timed. The eyes get illusional when it has to decide between multiple things quickly in a shorter time frame.
How might knowledge of visual illusions help improve design? Give an example. One of the first things I thought of was a distance illusion. If I were to try and design a training room or a meeting room I would slightly alter the size of objects on the further end of the room to attempt to give the room some dimension. I want the user to have the experience of seeing the room and getting a sense of the scale.
So a couple of other comments that I wanted to make based on the materials presented. Along the lines of the top down suppression working to block out the second ‘the’ in the statement, scientists believe the brain utilizes context to be able to decipher words and make sense of a something even when it is horribly misspelled. When hearing about the horizontal and vertical illusion I was reminded of Piaget’s Theory of Conservation where you have two short, wider glasses and a taller, narrow glass. You can ask a child which glass has more and they will say the same, but they can watch you pour one of the small glasses into the taller glass and when you ask again they will pick the taller glass. They lack the fundamental concept of conservation so they guess incorrectly, but it is a still a neat experiment. With regard to the blindspot and driving. I have one of those ‘smart cars’ that are nearly self-driving with the lane assist, blindspot monitoring, speed sensing cruise control. I think it’s fabulous and I can’t imagine driving without it now. I think that more and more cars will be adding this type of technology and we are not that far off from a truly self driving car. Not sure anyone outside of the 1% will be able to afford it, but it will be something.
Dan, we should have interviewed you for our consumer profile – we are working with smart car features. I will be looking forward to your feedback on our storyboards! 🙂
Module 22:
How might knowledge of visual illusions help improve design? Give an example.
My thoughts went directly to aesthetics. All my systems are all text based, so visual design is not something we take widely into consideration. But, we do look at where text boxes are placed and how the page is aligned to the rest of the system. When I am thinking of these illusions, I am thinking about the fact that my developers are programming things to be exactly equal, but with horizontal vertical illusion in play, it can cause the page to look less than pleasing. Several times I have sent the developers mock ups, where I have had move things on the page to make them more appropriate to the lines and sections on the page, even though it meant they no longer followed previously set guidelines.
Visual illusions can be important to make sure the user perceives something the way a designer wants. One example could be in a video game. Particularly on older, 8-bit video games, where resolution is severely limited, it could be difficult to give 3D effects since there weren’t enough pixels or colors for things like shadows. One way a 3D effect could be achieved was to have small object moving slowly across the screen, and slightly larger objects moving more quickly across the screen. This gives the effect that there is a motion effect, and the objects are in the background. The smaller, slower moving objects are perceived as being farther away than the larger, faster objects.
How might knowledge of visual illusions improve design? Give an example.
From an engineering aspect, a valuable aspect of visual illusions could be reducing processing and amount of design needed to have a pleasing UI. I am currently renovating a house, and I see this effect exactly from putting up drywall. The goal when mudding the drywall is not to make a perfectly flat surface, that would waste a huge amount of time. Instead, because of how vision works, the goal is just to spread out uneven surfaces to a long distance instead of having a sharp incline/decline. Doing this makes it so that the height difference does not cast a shadow, so is not perceptible. Correct lighting can also help, as if there is no light thrown at a sharp angle to the surface, then shadows cannot be cast. These visual illusions reduce material use and manpower needed. These same ideas can be used for any human computer interaction, where the system does not need to be perfect, just needs to be designed in a way that humans cannot perceive issues. An example of this is the refresh rates of screens. Images on screens are not persistent, and are only updated at a certain frequency. Humans see a persistent image because the frequency is higher than they can perceive the change. There is no need to waste resources updating faster, because there is no benefit.
Another potential benefit in understanding visual illusions is the potential that will be available with the availability of virtual reality. As the video showed, movement at the peripheral of the eye “adds” more information. This effect could be used when the system wants to draw the users gaze in a particular direction in an unobtrusive way. This may feel more natural that having a huge arrow in the center of the screen pointing in the direction they want the user to look. This is particularly important in the aspect in the lecture in the discussion of screen size. As screens get bigger, or are all encompassing in the VR example, utilizing peripheral vision will be much more important as not all of the information can possibly be in the users center of vision.
I realize this is a bit late, but better than not at all…
Regarding the prompt for examples where colorblindness might pose an issue, certainly it would be a factor in any visual interface where color is used as an indicator of particular classes, categories, or status of object or links. Red and green are very recognizable in terms of their semantic symbolism (stop/go) but using these to signal the status or attributes of items on screen would be worse than useless to someone with red-green colorblindness. In fact it would be worse than useless, as it might actually lead to these opposites being confused with one another. So color coding things on screen might really become an issue if this information isn’t redundant elsewhere. Ideally, color coding would be something the user could set for themselves so that the colors are visually distinct and relevant to the individual.
Regarding the request for ideas on what other kinds of testing can be more effective for driving exams besides acuity testing, I thought one practical test might be to show them images with pertinent signs in the periphery, and see if they are recognized. Especially for the example of getting onto a highway exit ramp in the wrong direction, which seems to be a big issue in rural areas, or yield signs, pedestrian warnings, etc.
For the prompt in module 22 regarding optical illusions:
We can see that optical illusions are used all the time in advertising to give the illusion that items are bigger or heavier or more substantial than they actually are, or to de-emphasize attributes that might turn people off, or just to draw your eye to some emotion-grabbing symbolism. Designers in these cases are taking advantage leveraging the way we perceive size, distance, symmetry, ambiguous symbolism, and other top-down subjectivities in order to focus our attention on certain aspects of an image and to create a more attractive perception of their product. A car interior looks more spacious if the driver is the size of a horse racing jockey, and the photos of many apartment listings are taken with wide angle lenses and from exactly the right perspective to make the place appear a lot bigger than it is.