Interactions - January/February 2009

A product’s brand,
visual style, and the
collective treatment
and interplay between
elements that lend
to its character are
a few of the obvious
ways in which visual
design contributes
to the software user
experience.

[ 3] Martin, Roger L. “Creativity That Goes Deep.” Business Week. 3 August 2005.

system themes. To control this, we used Eclipse’s ability to read RGB values as a way to anticipate the resulting color, without hard-coding the colors per system theme. We can now attain richer UI rendering of widgets, views, and editors simply by manipulating color with basic code rules. It was through the process of testing colors in design, understanding how they would behave once implemented, and providing the color rules that this was possible.

While much is accomplished in software development without the aid of visual designers, the interfaces that get produced can be limited by toolkits and scant exploration prior to implementation. Increased general exposure to more viscerally delightful mainstream software interfaces is helping to drive an increased appetite for similar experiences in software development tools. Visual design has a role to play not only in making these interfaces visually engaging but also more thoughtfully designed, by bringing to them a unique perspective and practices that can help take design issues toward more considered solutions.

January + February 2009

[ 4] Archer, A.
“Forms: Ne w in
3. 3.,” Eclipse Corner
Articles. September
2007. <http://www.
eclipse.org/articles/
article.php?file=Article-
Forms33/ index.html>

Put in terms related to user experience, abductive reasoning is working from intuition and possibility, inductive reasoning is working from observation and user feedback, and deductive reasoning is working from design principles and established guidelines. All methods of inference are important in doing design. In the practice of visual design specifically, abductive reasoning plays an important role in the breadth and depth of ideas generated that ultimately contribute to more-considered product solutions.

Making the abstract concrete is the hands-on extension of the thinking process.

Visual designers take ideas and turn them into something concrete, if still fictional, by giving them form and illuminating function. By mocking up the

possibilities, often in high fidelity—from single static screens to multiscreen interaction flows— we are able to see what “works” and what does not. It’s a way of thinking in pixels or vectors or moving images toward solutions.

A significant part of the value in this process is what is revealed without any commitment to code. This exploratory process also helps the team develop a sensibility to what is worth taking forward for further iteration, and is an excellent aid to making decisions on UI direction.

Working with constraints is an essential part of doing design. In software development, toolkits and technologies provide constraints, as do other factors, including customer requirements, user feedback, design principles, and best practices—all of which help bound the design space. While constraints are not unique to design, they increase the challenge, often making it a lot more interesting to solve the design problem. They have a tendency to help focus energy and encourage designers to think creatively beyond the imposed limits.

Using an Eclipse example, we gave the base form UI a facelift [ 4] and in doing so developed an approach to using color that allows the flexibility of customizing an Eclipse-based UI

without sacrificing its ability to adapt to the native operating system theme. We call this the “Adaptable Color Approach.” The constraint in this case was a limited palette derived from each of the standard operating systems that, if applied in any way other than the intended use, could result in wild variations in contrast and quality on the different

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kimberley Peter is a visual designer with the Media Design Studio at the IBM Toronto Lab. She works on

Eclipse- and Web-based applications for the IBM Rational Software brand. Her most recent design activities have been for the Jazz Project, where for the past few years she has enjoyed collaborating with her fellow design, usability, and development colleagues on the making of Jazz and the first Rational products to be based on it. Kimberley writes about user interface design and related issues on the Jazz Team Blog at https://jazz.net/blog.