The psychology of user interface (part I - spatial visualization)

People often misunderstand what drives good user interface. Certainly graphics is very important in the visceral sense that something is "cool", but in terms of whether someone understand how to do what they want to do, it should be obvious there is a lot more to it than that.

There are a bunch of rules that are worth learning that can greatly improve your product. I am not going to talk about most of those here. There are good books and good websites that will be much more focused and detailed in their process of talking about user interface.

What I do want to talk a little about is the psychology of interface design, because, as I have said in a previous article, much has been lost in the last 10 years in terms of “interface intelligence” that I feel may be recoverable now that the web software tools are improving.

First, I want to start with a concept called spatial visualization. Spatial visualization is the ability of an individual to “see” things in their mind that do not exist in an easily “minds eye visible” form. This could be anything from being able to clearly imagine how an object might look if you manipulated it a certain way to just being able to hold a complex math word problem in your head.

Spatial visualization is one of several components that make up intelligence. But there are many very intelligent people that do not have very good spatial visualization skills. If you think of where people are in terms of spatial visualization skills, as with most distributed data sets it is probably a bell curve. I haven’t done any research on this but I think we can stipulate that it is probably so.

Good interface design is in large part the development of an interface that does not aggressively engage the part of the brain engaged in spatial visualization.

You might argue that what I am saying here is that good interface design is designed to make things easy for dummies. And while this might be true in some simplistic way it really is not the essence of the issue. It is true that more people with more limited spatial visualization skills will be able to use your software if its demands in this area are more limited. But even people with advanced spatial visualization skills are slowed down by the need to visualize the framework of the system instead of the underlying information, which limits their ability to focus on the actual problem the software is designed to solve.

Ok, so how do you make software that requires limited spatial visualization? One answer is a concept called direct manipulation, is covered in part II of this series.