I am not a designer. I am…well…something else. So everything I know about UI and Human-Computer Interaction has been learned the hard way: spending countless hours using software and websites and wrestling with a UI so bad I wanted to gnaw my arm off.
And during that time, I’ve often thought, “Geez, shouldn’t this be quantifiable somehow? I mean, after all this time, shouldn’t there be some basic principles that guide this stuff?” The answer of course is “yes,” but it never occurred to me that there might actually be math behind it.
Courtesy of the fine folks at Daring Fireball comes a link to Kevin Hale’s lucid prose and pretty pictures which describe Fitt’s Law, the relationship between time, size and space which governs how easy it is to hit a link, choose a menu item or click a button.
I especially resonate with the section on the lack of “corners” in web applications. In meatspace, buttons have corners, so it’s easy to get feedback (often without looking) that your finger is in the right place. In the screenspace of an operating system, while you don’t get tactile feedback, the world has definite boundaries, which makes the edges and corners of the screen valuable. But in a web application, the browser window doesn’t limit the travel of your mouse, making edges and corners far less useful.
Heady stuff, but Kevin makes it seem simple.
Posted by Andrew Ball
