Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX - DesignModo

To keep it simple, user experience describes how users perceive a website, what kind of emotions they have when visiting a website, and whether or not they are motivated enough to return. This subjective experience is in a large part based on the visual appearance of a website.

Of course web design is its own field of expertise and one could claim that only experienced designers are capable of designing a good website and therefore provide the basis for high user experiences. There are some basic principles, though, that can help not only professionals to design an appealing website – the so called “Gestalt Laws”.

Figure 1 – Law of Similarity (Source)

Gestalt Laws

Gestalt Laws are simple principles or suggestions of how different elements can be perceived when combining them in a certain way/order. Gestalt Laws can help to create for example structure and a sense of togetherness on a website, they give suggestions on how to draw attention to elements that are important or how to create an impression of balance and stability.

Gestalt Laws find their origin in psychology and were first introduced in the twentieth century. Gestalt is a German term and can be translated with “shape” or “form”. Gestalt laws are basically regularities about how elements are perceived and organized into an unified whole.

The aim of this article is to give an overview of common Gestalt Laws, explain their possible effects, and present examples of how exactly different laws work in the context of a website. Gestalt Laws can seem quite simple, but their effects can have a big impact on a website’s user experience. The following Gestalt Laws will be addressed in this article: the Law of Proximity, the Law of Similarity, the Law of Closure, the Law of Good Continuation, the Law of Figure and Ground, the Law of Simplicity, the Law of Symmetry, and last but not least the Law of Experience.

Law of Proximity

The Law of Proximity indicates that elements that are near to each other tend to be perceived as a single unit. This can be very helpful for e.g. if you want to display two categories of elements on a web page of which each has more than one piece of content. You can easily group the pieces of one category by placing them closer to each other than the distance between the two categories. Figure 2 shows how this Gestalt Law is used on the UX Booth website to group elements that belong together. Different distances between the elements give us the impression of three columns, of which each contains one teaser per article.

Figure 2 – Law of Proximity (Source)

Law of Similarity

The Law of Similarity claims that elements that appear similar are perceived as one unit. So elements that have for e.g. the same color, shape, or other common characteristics, are perceived to be belonging together. This phenomenon can be very useful to group elements together that belong to one category. In Figure 3 you can see how CNN uses this Gestalt Law to present different topics within one news category as a unit.

Figure 3 – Law of Similarity (Source)

Law of Closure

The Law of Closure explains why elements are recognized even if they are incomplete or nonexistent. This is due to our previous experiences and prior knowledge about possible shapes and figures, thus mentally we can supplement missing parts of an element. Figure 4 shows how we used this law for our homepage usabilla.com. There is a white background with round corners that runs out towards the bottom of the page. Still, we do not perceive elements at the bottom of the page as falling apart, but we can imagine the content area continues.

Figure 4 – Law of Closure (Source)

Law of Good Continuation

The Law of Good Continuation can be applied to both the design aspect as well as the content aspect of elements. Eyes can easily and naturally follow elements that are arranged along a continuous line, those elements are therefore perceived as a unit. Further, elements that follow each other either logically or temporal, are perceived as unit as well. Figure 5 shows how Concept7 use the Law of Good Continuation on their website. Concept7 use a small arrow (at the bottom right hand side) to direct their users sight.

Figure 5 – Law of Good Continuation (Source)

Law of Figure and Ground

The Law of Figure and Ground describes how we rather perceive a figure than the background which flows around it. There are several factors that might contribute to this phenomenon. First of all, a defined figure has a more salient appearance whereas a background does not stand out. Furthermore, if one object is placed on top of another, in this case, a figure is placed on a background, the impression of depth emerges and therefore the figure actually appears to lie on top of the background.

Another reason that leads to this figure-ground assumption is that in case there is a border line between both objects, it is more likely interpreted to belong to the figure rather than the background. Figure 6 shows how we placed several logos on a colored background. Only the logos are perceived, not the shapes that result from placing the logo on the colored background.

Figure 6 – Law of Figure and Ground (Source)

Law of Simplicity

The Law of Simplicity indicates that elements are always perceived in the most easiest way possible. Simplicity of the whole emphasizes the importance of striking features. This can be used as an advantage on a website. Keep it simple and the focus on what really matters. We tried to keep our website as simple and clean as possible, so we can focus on what we really want to communicate. Figure 7 shows an extract from one of our pages.

Figure 7 – Law of Simplicity (Source)

Law of Symmetry

This law comprises the fact the we prefer symmetric appearances over asymmetric ones. Symmetric objects or arrangements are associated with positive aspects such as stability, consistency and structure. Asymmetric arrangements on the other hand give a rather negative impression, like something is wrong, missing, or out of balance.

Of course a website can never be completely symmetric, which is not at all the idea, but it is possible to pay attention to the perceived symmetry. So symmetry does not necessarily have to be created by content, but also by aesthetic elements such as color or design. For example, the head of the BBC website uses an abstract picture of a globe in the background to create a harmonious and balanced appearance.

Figure 8 – Law of Symmetry (Source)

Law of Experience

Another Gestalt Law that can be quite useful is the Law of Experience. It explains that we can expect others to use their prior knowledge in order to understand certain elements. A common example is related to grammar and spelling. For example sometimes we overlook a spelling mistake because we have memorized a word as a whole and do not look at every letter within the word specifically.

Outlook

There is a whole list of different Gestalt Laws, even more than we discussed in this article. Some Gestalt Laws are unique, others overlap each other, some are more useful for designing a website, others less, some might be easy to apply, others more complicated. But in general, we can conclude that Gestalt Laws do give some good advice, such as how to group elements that belong together, how to point the attention to elements that are important, or how to create an impression of balance and stability.

When designing or optimizing a website you should keep the Gestalt Laws in mind. Start with a solid and consistent design and create the base for a successful website. After working with Gestalt Laws for a while, you will see that they become internalized and that you will start to apply them naturally.

Also, you can specifically test whether or not you applied certain Gestalt Laws successfully. Do you want to find out if your users perceive certain content as a single unit? Or if they think that your website’s overall design appears to be harmonically or chaotic? Or if they actually focus their attention on the elements you want them to focus on? You can easily test your design and find answers to these questions – even in the conceptual stage.

Source: http://designmodo.com/use-gestalt-laws-to-improve-your-ux/#ixzz1ITGxPOrO

25 Quotes on Humour

Humour really is our saving grace, and it helps keep us psychologically healthy...

"Laugh as much as possible, always laugh. It's the sweetest thing one can do for oneself & one's fellow human beings." - Maya Angelou

"A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better." - Barbara Walters

"He who laughs, lasts." - Mary Pettibone Poole

"A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing." - Laura Ingalls Wilder

"There is nothing like a gleam of humour to re-assure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face." - Eva Hoffman

"Through humour, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it." - Bill Cosby

"A person without a sense of humour is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road." - Henry Ward Beecher

"It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously." - Oscar Wilde

"When humour goes, there goes civilisation." - Erma Bombeck

"A sense of humour... is needed armour. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life." - Hugh Sidey

"A sense of humour is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done" - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humour in it." - Frank A. Clark

"No mind is thoroughly well organised that is deficient in a sense of humour." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Comedy is acting out optimism." - Robin Williams

"A well-developed sense of humour is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life." - William Arthur Ward

"Humour can alter any situation and help us cope at the very instant we are laughing." - Allen Klein

"Humour is just another defense against the universe." - Mel Brooks

"Humour is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it." - Langston Hughes

"Humour is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs." - Christopher Morley

"If you could choose one characteristic that would get you through life, choose a sense of humour." - Jennifer Jones

"Humour is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humour than in anything else. Because, you see, humour is truth." - Victor Borge

"Humour is the affectionate communication of insight." - Leo Rosten

"Like a welcome summer rain, humour may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you." - Langston Hughes

"Next to power without honour, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humour." - Eric Sevareid

"The more I live, the more I think that humour is the saving sense." - Jacob August Riis

5 Famous Philosophers' Greatest Hypocrisies

Modern philosophy is less interested in the lives great thinkers led than in the texts they produced. But once upon a time, writes James Miller, "philosophers were figures of wonder." These august men were "a source of shared inspiration, offering, through words and deeds, models of wisdom, patterns of conduct, and, for those who took them seriously, examples to be emulated."

Or, sometimes, examples to be avoided.

In his new book, Examined Lives, Miller offers biographical sketches of 12 great philosophers, each of whom "struggled to life his life according to a deliberately chosen set of precepts and beliefs"—occasionally very unsuccessfully.

Brow Beat asked Miller, a professor of politics and director of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, to offer five examples of times when famous philosophers utterly failed to put their theories into practice. Here's his list:

1. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) taught in his Politics that "man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis," an independent city-state that was small enough for citizens to know each other personally. However, he tutored Alexander the Great and was notorious in the Greek world for his unblinking support of the Macedonian Empire. After the death of Alexander in 323 B.C., Greeks enraged by Aristotle's conduct tore down a plaque honoring him at Delphi and threw it into a well. (In the 20^th century, archeologists found fragments of the plaque.) Forced to flee for his safety from Athens, Aristotle died a year later in a city garrisoned by Macedonian troops.

2. In his essays, Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) praised a life of moderation devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, but as one of the Nero's highest-ranking associates he was a master of propaganda. For example, shortly after the emperor had poisoned a rival, Seneca drafted a speech, "On Mercy," praising the good ruler for "innocence of wrong"—a fawning admonition. Four years later, he helped the emperor figure out how to finish up a botched murder of Agrippina, Nero's mother. When he admits such contradictions in his writing, Seneca is disarming: "I am not wise," he demurs, "Require me not to be equal to the best, but better than the worst." Nero eventually ordered Seneca to commit suicide—which he did by slicing open his veins in a tub of steaming hot water.

3. Although Augustine (354-430) once declared that "there is more than one road to wisdom," he helped the early Roman Catholic Church turn persecution into an intellectual art form, as ruthlessly effective in theory as it could sometimes be in practice. As a bishop of his church in Northern Africa, he ordered the destruction of pagan temples and impassively watched while his denunciations provoked a rash of religious suicides, saying that God had allowed the heretics to "perish in their own flames" by "a hidden, though just, disposition."

4. In his writings, René Descartes (1596-1650) claimed that he could secure an indubitable foundation for his philosophy by relying on the principles of pure mathematics. In reality, the inspiration for his scientific outlook was a series of dreams that he regarded, dubiously enough, as a revelation conveyed by a divine messenger. Years later, he attempted to prove in his Meditations that he had not fallen prey to "some malicious demon of the utmost cunning and power," because "it is impossible that God should ever deceive me"—one of the least persuasive arguments in the history of philosophy.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) devoted an entire treatise, Emile, to showing how to raise a perfectly virtuous child—yet he abandoned all of his own children with his long-term mistress to a foundlings' home. He pleaded that poverty and poor health made him unfit to be a proper parent, while protesting that no one loved children more than he did. But at the end of his life, he had to concede that living an examined life had proved far harder than he had initially thought-and that "to dare to profess great virtues" without the courage needed to practice them "is to be arrogant and rash."

5 Famous Philosophers' Greatest Hypocrisies

Quotes by Mahatma Gandhi

"Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth."

"I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage."

"Where there is love there is life."

"Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love."

"My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind."

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave."

"Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding."

"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."

"I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people."

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."

"A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act."

"I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul."

"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame."

"Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible."

"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide."

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves."

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

"To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man."

"Hatred can be overcome only by love."

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/quote-4?author=Gandhi,%20Mahatma&s2=Mahatma%20Gandhi#ixzz1Ch0oYTyY

More quotes by Mahatma Gandhi from Answers.com

Production Companies accepting scripts

Production Companies

Getting your unsolicited script made (that’s any script written by a writer who is not represented by an agent), or at least read by a production company, is about the toughest way to break into the industry, but lots of people still ask me about it so here’s my two-pennies-worth…

If I go back only ten years I could have written a list here of nearly a hundred film and television production companies who would accept scripts submitted by new writers (writers they didn’t know, and who didn’t have an agent). I know because I made a living reading for about twenty of them. Sadly, that is no longer the case. It costs money to employ readers to plough through tens of thousands of scripts each year. The reality is that of those thousands of spec scripts, only a handful will be good enough for the production company to want to develop it and try to get it made. In essence the return on the money invested in reading unsolicited scripts is too small to make it viable for most companies.

However, maybe you are that one in ten thousand whose script is pretty much perfect but you don’t yet have an agent or any credits to your name. So how do you get a production company to read your script if you don’t have an agent? Well, there are still a handful of places accepting unsolicited submissions. The two biggies are BBC Writersroom (for television drama) and the UK Film Council (for feature films). These are two large organisations with the structure and funding to read huge numbers of scripts and take forward any projects they come
across that really excite them.

I’ve listed below all the places I’ve found that do still accept unsolicited script submissions. Check out their websites and follow their submission guidelines. If in doubt, contact them and ask what their policy is.

BBC Writersroom

Bona Broadcasting

Panther Pictures

Phantom Pictures

Picture Palace

Red Production Company

Red Planet Pictures

RS Productions

Achilles Entertainments

UK Film Council (due to be abolished, with the distribution of Lottery Funding taken on by the British Film Institute while inward investment transfers to Film London.

Do bear in mind that I’m not recommending these production companies, I’m just pulling together information that’s already in the public domain. It’s up to you to do your homework.

Vivian Maier - Photographer

Photographic Editing

Why is editing important?
Photography is a communication medium. Every shot is a story that we are trying to tell, to show and inform the viewer. Editing is how we clarify that story, or help it fit within a particular contextual expression. If you start typing random letters on a page, you get gibberish, something nobody can understand, and nobody will care about. If instead of letters you start typing random words, viewers will be able to recognize the words, but there will be no focus or understanding regarding what you are trying to tell them. Start assembling the words, and suddenly people start to more clearly understand what you are trying to explain to them. Give further thought and refinement to how you arrange those words, restructure the grammar to impart more drama into your story, and suddenly you have poetry, prose, or a gripping novel that captures peoples attention, and triggers an emotional connection between the reader (viewer) and the story you have crafted for them.

Editing Photos is no different from editing text. You start with the idea that you want to convey, and then you determine the best way to use and arrange all of the elements at your disposal to make your story as clear, and emotionally accessible as possible. Some of that editing takes place in the field while looking through the view finder, and the rest takes place while comparing shots after the fact.

As a photographer what does photo editing entail? Is there a best practice to follow?
Assuming for editing in this context, we’re referring to after capture editing.  Editing is the process by which we sift through our shots of a particular scene, and determine which image has the most dramatic impact, or clarity of subject or story. When taking that one second to review a page of 20 slides, there was always an image which stood out from the crowd, whose focus was so clear, and whose subject was so readily apparent, that there was no doubt within that one instance regarding what that image was about, or the story or emotion it was trying to convey.

Editing is subjective, and photographers are usually our own worst editors, since we’re emotionally invested in the images we make. We want to like everything we’ve taken, and we feel that everyone should respond to
our images just the way we hoped or intended.

And in the real world… it doesn’t quite work that way. Editing is personal, and it’s brutally tough if you can be hard enough on yourself to try and view your work objectively and dispassionately. But as best practice, edit out anything out of focus right off the bat. Anything over or underexposed that’s not recoverable… goodbye. Once all the outtakes are moved aside, I generally recommend the half approach. For any scene, or bracketed series, or any number of images, do a first run through and mark any image you think is good. Let’s say out of 100 shots, mark 50. Then of those 50, half them again, down to 25, 12, then be as tough as nails, and try and weed it down to a top 10, or 8, 6, or even 1.

What pitfalls do most photographers often run into when attempting to
edit their work?
Many photographers, myself included have what I called the Magic File Drawer. (digital folder or file cabinet) That’s where you’d put all those over/under exposed or out of focus blurry images, and in a few years, you’d re-open the drawer, hoping against hope that those “gee-I’d-really-wished-that-came-out” image would suddenly emerge perfect and flawless. Learn to let go of those images. I know it’s tough, but it’s understandable given that we’re all so connected to our own images, yet it needs to be done. Next on the list is that most photographers see in the image exactly what they wanted to see, as if they had magic zoom lenses for eyeballs. Yet for all that they see in the image, they most often fail to miss the obvious distractions or compositional flaws that keep the viewer from seeing the story as clearly as the photographer. You need to look at your own images fresh, like you’ve never seen it before, and ask yourself, is this showing what I want to show in the best possible way. If not, is there something I can do to fix or clarify the scene / story.

What does a photographers final edit say about the photographer or their work (to those viewing the final selections)?
Simply put, the combined in-field and post capture editing communicate the strength, style, and potency of the photographers personal vision. The refined editing is what captures the viewers attention and says “Here I Am; Look at me!” The combination of vision and editing determine whether the viewer is going to be hit upside the head with a marshmallow or a mallet. The viewer instantly responds, “oh yeah, wow! I get it” or “um….ok; it’s nice, but I’m not really sure about….”.

Is there a favorite story of yours that you can share when photo editing made an impact in your professional career?
I can’t really think of any one instance that made an impact on my career, probably because I’ve been doing this now for nearly 20 years.

One of the cardinal rules of editing slides or images for clients was “Only give the client what they are asking for”, and don’t throw in totally irrelevant images just because you think it’s a nice image. Yet countless times, I’ve still thrown in an image or two to a submission that I knew wasn’t what the client was asking for, and they’d wind up picking that image. It just goes to prove that editing, like viewing images is a subjective art that defies hard and fast rules. But the bottom line is that it’s a learned talent that takes practice. Listen to your inner critic, yet feel free to follow what your gut says. Sometimes I really love an image, and yet no one else seems to get it, and other times I’ve shot an image that I think is OK, but nothing special, and when I post it to an online photo forum I get raves and comments like “one of the best I’ve ever seen from you”

The one thing I like to leave my consulting and workshop clients with is the saying that people will judge you by your weakest image.  Strive always to show your best, or at least find out what you could do to make an image better. Editing is about making your story clearer and your image(s) stronger. Go into that back room closet, or down to the goodwill store, get yourself a nice coat of armored skin, and think “Slash & burn”. The tougher you get, the stronger vision you’ll portray, and viewers will respond.

Sites to See Photography and Writing