Chapter 3

We Seek and Use Visual Structure

Abstract

People use visual structure to help them extract information from what they see. Therefore, interactive systems that display information in structured ways allow people to extract the desired information more easily and quickly. This chapter gives examples of structured versus nonstructured information displays. For example, an important goal in presenting information is to provide a visual hierarchy—an arrangement of the information that breaks the information into distinct sections and subsections, labels sections prominently to clearly identify their content, and presents higher-level sections more strongly than lower-level ones. This allows people, when scanning information, to separate ...

Get Designing with the Mind in Mind, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.