dmark@sunybcs (David Mark) (04/25/88)
REQUEST: Does anyone our there know of any expert systems (or other kinds of software systems) for evaluating the graphic design of a display? I am thinking of something which takes either an object- oriented description of a graphic, or a bit-map of an image, and evaluates such graphic concepts as balance, figure-ground, contrast, etc. Some of us in Geography in Buffalo are working on a cartographic expert system, and it seems to us that (at least some) general principles of graphic design will apply and be useful in the map domain. So if such a system already exists, we would be wasting time trying to re-invent it. If people reply to me via email, I will summarize responses to the net. David Mark, Professor, Geography dmark@joey.cs.buffalo.edu dmark@sunybcs.BITNET
gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) (04/26/88)
In article <10494@sunybcs.UUCP> dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark) writes: >REQUEST: Does anyone our there know of any expert systems (or other >kinds of software systems) for evaluating the graphic design of a >display? >If people reply to me via email, I will summarize responses to the net. Sorry, email can be flakey from Europe. Main references I know are %A D.J. Streveler %A A.I. Wasserman %T Quantitative Measures of the Spatial Properties of Screen Designs %J INTERACT'84 %V 1 %I Elsevier/IEE %P 124-133 (participants edition) %D 1984 %O 1985 edition pub. North Holland %A T. Tullis %T Designing a menu-based interface to an operating system %J CHI '85 %P 79-84 %D 1985 %A T.S. Tullis %T Optimising the Usability of Computer-Generated Displays %B People and Computers: Designing for Usability %E M.D. Harrison and A. Monk %I Cambridge University Press %C Cambridge %P 604-613 %D 1986 These measures covered are useful, but very crude. Graphic designers are not ones for writing things down, nor can I see them rushing to have their knowledge elicited by production rule hackers. It is far more efficient to find a NUMBER of graphic designers locally and ask them to evaluate your display layouts. Then use your judgement to decide on which advice to take. If you've got a long time, you could implement some alternative designs for aspects of the display and get a human factors expert (not a theoretical psychologist) to help you to compare human performance effects of the design alternatives. You could also discuss design alternatives in the first place with such an expert. Use paper here, as it's more efficient in early design than most screen generators - MacDraw is a good early prototyping tool. Finally, try things out on representative end-users, who may like neither the aesthetics of your preferred designer nor the optimum performance of the human factors experiment. This all seems harder than just running a program, but I can assure you that it is all a lot easier than trying to design one to do an equivalent job. We do not have a computational account of good graphical design, are unlikely to gain one in the near future, and probably never will reduce aesthetics to some thing as ugly as a Turing equivalent formalism. Of course, the phenomenological aspects of end-user preferences can NEVER be automated or simulated, because such phenomenology is defined to be human experiences and categorically absolutely nothing else. It is as computable as a daffodil!
dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark) (04/29/88)
In article <1027@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert\ Cockton) writes: (in response to my earlier posting) (several useful references deleted) >These measures covered are useful, but very crude. Graphic designers >are not ones for writing things down, nor can I see them rushing to >have their knowledge elicited by production rule hackers. It is far >more efficient to find a NUMBER of graphic designers locally and ask >them to evaluate your display layouts. Then use your judgement to >decide on which advice to take. It is my opinion that the content and components of maps in a geographic information systems (GIS) application vary so much that we cannot have "our layouts" to be evaluated by expert designers. Does anyone know of work which confirms or contradicts this, or knowledge of a graphics domain as complicated and variable as map production that has been 'solved' in a design sense? David M. Mark, Professor of Geography dmark@joey.cs.buffalo.edu
pattis@june.cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) (04/30/88)
Jock Mackinlay (sp?) wrote a thesis on under Mike Genesereth at Stanford, about a year or two ago, that discussed a program that decided on the way to graphically display such information.
gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) (05/02/88)
In article <10712@sunybcs.UUCP> dmark@sunybcs.UUCP (David Mark) writes: >It is my opinion that the content and components of maps in a geographic >information systems (GIS) application vary so much that we cannot have >"our layouts" to be evaluated by expert designers. Does anyone know of work >which confirms or contradicts this, or knowledge of a graphics domain >as complicated and variable as map production that has been 'solved' in a >design sense? There will never be a final 'solution' to many graphic design problems, but as it is graphic designers who: a) work with these problems all day b) largely define (versions of) what aesthetics IS in the popular consciousness then I'm sure that good graphic designer's could improve the subjective response to some layouts. As far as cartography is concerned, the British Ordnance survey redesigned their 1:50000 maps over 10 years ago and I'm sure that there will be publications about this revision process and the principles involved. Experienced map-users, as would be expected, intensely disliked the changes to their user interfaces! I was a teenager at the time, adjusted fairly quickly and now find it difficult to navigate with the old maps. I'd say the U.K. O.S. had am improved 'solution' here. For other forms of information, there is a substantial psychological literature on information presentation. The results are piecemeal, but they could be integrated into an interactive design assistant (which some might even call an expert system!). P.S. This is probably no longer a comp.ai discussion (unlike free-will :-)) Follow-ups to comp.cog-eng?