ing soccer results and NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory’s use of
the RCP for its Mars missions.
Currently, there is no easy way
to visually skin an Eclipse-based
application. The effect is that
most Eclipse-based apps end up
inheriting the look and feel that
comes “out of the box.” This is
handy if you want or need to
adapt to the look and feel of the
native operation system, but
there is no distinction for your
application from any other built
with Eclipse. This could be seen
as a purely aesthetic drag or a
significant business problem.
One might need to customize an
application to align its look with
brand guidelines or existing
products, to distinguish it from
a competing product that is also
built using Eclipse, or to better
suit a nontechnical audience. To
a degree, customization is possible, yet it requires additional
effort in design and code.
Another popular open source
toolkit is the Web-based Dojo
and its widget library “dijit.”
These are highly customizable,
yet often we see the default
dijit theme “Tundra” used, as
is. Why? People use the default
because it looks acceptable and
because the cost of change is
prohibitive—it requires less
effort and less cost to simply
accept the standard look and
feel.
Toolkits come with a great
deal of useful functionality that
can serve to propagate patterns,
fostering not only good practice
through use but also consistent
presentation and interaction
across suites of tools and products—something that is particularly important if there are
multiple and distributed teams
working on different parts of
the software. But except for the
accompaniment of interface
guidelines, if present, the use
of toolkits does not necessarily
make for the most appropriate
or desirable UI presentation,
much less one that is tailored to
brand or audience.
Even if the toolkit provides
widgets and styles to manipulate, the decisions and details
around style, organization and
flow of the information, composition and alignment, or appropriateness of color and other
cues are typically not part of the
package.
Value in Practice
Whether or not toolkits are
used, these details and design
outcomes are the result of
certain activities and modes
of thinking that visual designers contribute, in some ways
uniquely, to software development projects.
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. More interesting are the
nonobvious ways in which these
things come about, where perhaps their greater value lies. It
is through things like abductive
reasoning, making the abstract
concrete, and working with constraints that visual designers
and their craft can add significant value.
Abductive reasoning is something Roger L. Martin, dean of
Rotman School of Management,
describes as embracing the logic
of what might be rather than
what is (inductive) or must be
(deductive) [ 3].
• Some examples, from the Eclipse Plug-in Development form editor, of how the color
adapts to native system themes.