Through my research on these two significant theories in interaction design history, I really felt the process of design development which made designing what we are today.
In my study of interaction design in recent years and up to the present day, these design theories seem to be well understood. But I didn’t really know much about the history and story behind them. I just know these terms and will take these aspects into consideration when doing UI design. It was very interesting to learn the story behind the development of these theories, and the process of how these great people discovered and eventually developed these theories helped me to better understand them.
The Gestalt principle comes from Gestalt psychology. The original meaning of Gestalt is the German word for shape. It was originally proposed by German psychologist Max Wertheimer in 1912 and was improved later by Wolfgang Köhler (1929), Kurt Koffka (1935), and Wolfgang Metzger (1936). After observing what Max called the phi phenomenon while watching alternating lights on a railway signal. It was originally about the human visual hallucination that when seeing some static object moving at a high altitude, the person’s visual hallucination would interpret that it was continuous dynamic motion. The brain imagines that it is “continuous”. This discovery was further developed into the way humans receive visual information. These include Similarity, Proximity, Closure and Continuity, which are now what we call Gestalt principles.
fitt’s law is a mathematical model that is a formula describes the relationship between human movement time in a point-and-click task and the size and distance of the target. According to his formula, ID is positively correlated with the distance of the target (D); ID is negatively correlated with the width of the target (W). The farther the distance to the target, the more difficult the task, and the more time and precision the user needs to select the target; the wider the width of the target, the less difficult the task, and the wider target makes it easier for the user to select the target accurately.
Both theories are very important foundations in design. Through this study, I realized that I should consider these two aspects more in my future visual design to make my product experience better. The design style should follow the gestalt principles so that the language of design is unified and the related elements should be consistent in appearance. The related buttons or icons should be placed in a group, and their sizes and distances should be arranged properly according to Fitt’s law. Then add some continuous colors or lines to the interface to suggest to the user that there is a connection. The more I understand these theories, the easier and more seamlessly I can apply these theories to my design.
