UI Flashcards
UI
UI design focuses on the aesthetics of an app and how those aesthetics can be used to enhance the user experience. It deals with selecting colors, typography, and styles, and applying them to a user interface (UI).
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology is a school of thought focused on understanding the way our minds organize and process the world around us. The movement was founded in Germany around 1912 and has since been instrumental in explaining how our minds process information. The central principle of Gestalt psychology was concisely summarized by one of its co-founding psychologists Kurt Koffka: “The whole is other than the sum of the parts.”
Kurt Koffka - Gestalt psychology
“The whole is other than the sum of the parts.”
gestalt
an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.
Gestalt Properties
You’ll know, for example, that users will see a UI pattern before they see each individual element within it.
Gestalt Properties:
Emergence - is what explains our recognition of objects by their whole rather than their parts.
Reification - explains the way our minds attempt to fill information gaps when they don’t recognize an object’s outline. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “to reify” means “to give definite content and form to (a concept or idea).”
Multi-Stability - When an object can be interpreted in multiple ways, your mind will bounce back and forth between perceptions.
Say you’re working on the design of a home icon. You’d want to make sure the user’s eyes see nothing but the home icon (as opposed to bouncing back and forth between the icon and another unwanted image).
Invariance - states that our minds can recognize an object regardless of its rotation, perspective, or scale. Let’s go back to our dog example.
Law of Prägnanz
This law states that our minds naturally look for patterns in an attempt to organize information in predictable ways.
Gestalt Laws of Grouping
laws you can adhere to as a UX designer:
Law of Proximity
Law of Similarity
Law of Closure
Law of Good Continuation
Law of Common Fate
Law of Good Form
Law of Proximity
The law of proximity is simple: our minds automatically group together nearby elements. Whether the elements are similar is beside the point—the sheer fact that they’re close to each other will force our minds to think of them as a unit.
Law of Similarity
Just as our mind groups nearby elements, so, too, does our mind group visually similar elements. Similarities aren’t limited to color and shape; similarities in size, design, and style can also be effective, and there’s no requirement that the similar elements be near each other.
Law of Closure
Remember reification? Closure is just the same. It explains how our minds will try to fill in information gaps wherever they exist. Consider the following image. Closure is what reveals the triangle even when it’s not there.
