1. User-Centered Visual Design:
Views from Four Perspectives
Michael Schmidt, Director The University of Memphis Center for Multimedia Art Member, Palliative & End of Life Care Program St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

2. Views from Four Perspectives:
Tactical - formal means for constructing visual artifacts
Strategic - rhetorical means for conveying visual concepts
Transformative - experiential means for greater user-centered insight
Contextual - systemic means for framing, organizing, and sustaining a continuum of experiences, messages, and artifacts

3. Postscript:
Aesthetics

4. Tactical View: Artifact

5. Closure

6. Continuation

7. Centers and edges--how the eye structures form into pattern and patterns into larger structures.

8. Hierarchy: alignment, proximity, contrast (of scale, proximity, weight), variety and harmony.

9. Piet Zwart
1924

10. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
1925

11. 1922 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Untitled Construction 1922
Tempera and collage on panel
Galerie Dr. I. Schlégl, Zurich
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
1922

12. 1925 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Possibilities seemed limitless . . .
While the human brain seemed hard-wired for this innately logical language of vision.
1925
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

13. Modern
Joost Schmidt
1923

14. Rational
Jan Tschichold

15. Progressive
El Lissitsky
1917

16. Endless permutations
Ladislav Sutnar
1950

17. Part of consumer/popular culture
McCall’s, August 1959
Otto Storch

18. Saul Bass Ivan Chermayeff Paul Rand Yusaku Kamekura Raymond Loewy
Part of our corporate culture
Saul Bass
Ivan Chermayeff
Paul Rand
Yusaku Kamekura
Raymond Loewy

19. Part of our information culture
Massimo Vignelli
c. 1980

20. Information as art; art as communication of information--but all forming a rational hierarchy.
Willi Kunz

21. Form can be illustrative (literal) but also expressive of the intangible (music)
Rosemarie Tissi
1996

22. environmental
Bruno Manguzzi
1992

23. Or just light and color
Neville Brody
1999

24. Josef Muller-Brockman

25. User-centered tactics?
Does this constitute a user-centered approach?

26. * don't use more than 4 different font sizes per screen
* use serif or sans serif fonts appropriately as the visual task
situation demands
* don't use all uppercase letters - use an uppercase/lowercase mix
* don't overuse audio or video
* don't use more than 4 different colors on a screen
* don't use blue for text (hard to read), blue is a good background color
* don't put red text on a blue background
* use high contrast color combinations
* use colors consistently
* use only 2 levels of intensity on a single screen
* Use underlining, bold, inverse video or other markers sparingly
* on text screens don't use more than 3 fonts on a single screen
No. Insufficient by itself.
And existing heuristics (Neilsen) deal very little with visual design. What heuristics do exist amount to a prosaic list of do’s and don’ts.
(From Cornell University Ergonomics Web)

27. Strategic View: Concept

28. Thus far we’ve addressed the formal, or compositional techniques of design. Here we begin to address the rhetorical techniques of design.
This UI for The Urban Child Institute employs juxtaposition, showing the empirical proof of benefit brought about by successful parenting of newborns.

29. Visual Concept: a plan for generating intellectual and emotional responses by combining verbal and visual content—formally and rhetorically—in a manner that exploits both the advantages and the limitations of the chosen medium.

30. Here color--a constituent element of the chosen medium--serves a key role in executing the visual concept (or plan).

31. A more direct example.
Visual concept is also brand strategy

40. User-centered strategy:
How will these concepts resonate with the participants?
With access to users:
Website for TUCI: they help create the concepts by informing the process from the beginning: functional requirements, content priorities, even the look and feel.
Conducting surveys, interviews, and observations.

41. Without access to users: evaluative techniques from the emerging advocacy evaluation field.
(Summative as opposed to formative evaluation--conventional forms of eval as opposed to usability engineering techniques.)

42. With limited, tightly controlled access to users: augment interviews or focus groups with SMEs and contextual obs (sit in on rounds)

43. Transformative View: Experience

44. Legacy bldg and advance care planning
Suffering with the sufferer
(really suffering for one’s art!)
From Wikipedia:
Patient is derived from the Latin word patiens, the present participle of the deponent verb pati, meaning "one who endures" or "one who suffers".

51. Contextual View: Systems

52. Comprehensive care plan
Individualized Care Planning
Understanding
the illness
experience
Sharing
relevant
information
Step 1:
Relationship
Needs assessment
Step 2:
Negotiation
Prognosis
Expressing
goals
Treatment options
Step 3:
Plan
Establishing
a life plan
Medical plan
Comprehensive care plan

53. Comprehensive care plan
Individualized Care Planning
Understanding
the illness
experience
Sharing
relevant
information
Step 1:
Relationship
Needs assessment
Step 2:
Negotiation
Prognosis
Expressing
goals
Treatment options
Step 3:
Plan
Establishing
a life plan
Medical plan
Comprehensive care plan

54. Postscript: Aesthetics
Aesthetics pervades everything discussed

59. Michael Schmidt, Director The University of Memphis Center for Multimedia Art Member, Palliative & End of Life Care Program St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital