Introduction

“Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative … should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and the useful.”

—Paul Rand, A Designer’s Art, p. 3

Digital applications are designed for use. They help people get things done, whether purchasing a gift, conducting research, processing patients, or managing systems. They’re highly interactive. They display content pulled from databases. They communicate with other systems. They’re dynamic, and change without our touching them. They often enable more than one type of activity, such as finding and managing patient records.

As designers who focus on user experience for complex applications, too often we see applications that ...

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