The properties of Gestalt psychology are ever-present in today’s interfaces. Knowing how these properties affect the brain allows designers and developers to leverage the physiological and cognitive responses that are hard wired into their users.
The basic properties and of Emergence, Reification, Multistability and Invariance are foundations of design and will be defined and explained traditionally, then reviewed through current real-world user interfaces.
The Gestalt laws: Closure, Similarity, Proximity, Symmetry, Continuity and Common Fate offer a fantastic set of “best practices” rooted in theory and can be easily implemented into any existing workflow.
By giving designers and developers tried-and-true rules based on cognitive theories, we can further remove opinion from the process, and focus once again on the user. Designers will be interested to know why they do this inherently, developers can utilize the Laws as a loose set of rules, and administration/support roles will learn how clients may interpret design approaches.
Michael Salamon is a User Experience Designer at EffectiveUI, an award-winning and recognized leader in the design and development of custom rich Internet, desktop and mobile applications.
With nearly 20 years’ experience, Michael’s work spans print, Web, mobile, interactive, motion, illustration and animation. With a thorough history in the printing industry, Michael made the move to the Web with the rest of the chunky black glasses crowd and helped define interaction methods still used today. His cients have ranged from huge multi-national big-shot companies to modest one-person shops including: Quark, Intuit, Cendant (CheapTickets), JCPenney’s, Home Depot, Cabela’s. Dish Network, Staz, Ci-Ci’s Pizza and Northrop Grumman.
