Window Layout: Cures for Cryptovision

Among the incredible range of neuropsychological debilities, few are more puzzling than "prosopagnosia." This strange malady removes the ability to "recognize" a familiar face! Yes, the victim still sees quite well. However, no dawn of recognition occurs when seeing the face of one's spouse, child, or friend. The victim must examine the clothing and remember the voice to identify loved ones standing before them. The victim sees, but doesn't understand. We call this "living with cryptovision." No cure exists.

In screen design, your users may also experience "cryptovision." They see the screen, but fail to recognize any meaningful task. Luckily, this illness seems to appear only on certain screens, typically those that other people designed. Never your screens! This symptom reflects the wily style of the eternal foe, cryptodesign. It strikes when we least expect. Let's investigate the clinical prescription for combating this insidious neuro-crypto-agent, another enemy in our war against GUI's from hell. Recall, cryptodesign manifests itself when a design that solves one problem gets misapplied to other, quite different circumstances.

HOW TO READ A RECTANGLE Different rectangles demand different viewing techniques. Imagine you're at the Louvre and the rectangle on the wall contains a smiling female head-and-shoulders pose backed by mysterious, cragged and hazed rock formations. Notice how your gaze begins at a graphically "dominant" shape or color. Then it follows a path almost "prescribed" by the artist. Your eye traverses the mouth, the brow, the eyes, then back to the mouth again. Over and over. We're charmed, enchanted, and transported by the ineffable smile of La Giaconda.

On the other hand, if this rectangle had textual commentary covering some 30% of the area, where would your eye begin? Would you begin in the middle, where you suspect an important or a bolded and italicized word resides? No. Most of us would exercise our convention of "reading" the text and thus begin at the leftmost side of the topmost line. (Readers of Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese text would follow their own directional conventions in their native language.) In conclusion, we use a different strategy to understand rectangles containing words compare to rectangles containing just pictures. Most screens display text. Therefore, we should expect users to "read" those text-oriented screens like we read a book.

The crypto-wounded designer has forgotten this convention and expects users to invent a task flow on the fly. The crypto-designer failed to build clear task flow into the screen design. See Figure 1 for an example. In defeating insidious cryptovision, the soul-designer quietly enlists our habit of reading. The soul designer creates meaning in the screen layout by enlisting our conventional reading pattern. See Figure 2.

Now let's see other methods by which cryptovision agents infiltrate screen designs and how you can mount a soul filled counterattack.