Look Around

Take a moment and look around. Are you inside? Then you might come across books, a pile of mail, your computer and television. Or maybe you're outside, carrying your mobile device, and checking your appointments. The world we live in is surrounded by ubiquitous information. Information that is visual, audible, and tactile. It it meant to inform, to entertain, to instruct, and to warn. Because we are constantly bombarded with this information in our daily lives, we must quickly collect, filter, store, and process which of it is important to use for specific tasks.

Consider a busy intersection you are trying to cross. You are surrounded by the sights and sounds of pedestrians conversing, cars and trucks honking, birds flying, signage on billboards, and thousands of other types of stimuli. Our minds have an amazing ability to focus on the task at hand, filter the surrounding "noise," process, store, and allow us to act on only the relevant "signal" information.

When the crosswalk signal changes to "Walk," we identify the sign, interpret its meaning, determine an action to move our body forward, carry out our actions by walking until you've crossed the street achieving your goal.

Understanding how we process and filter visual information, or data, will help us design effective displays of information on mobile devices. Let’s first explore the types of information.

Types of Visual Information

All humans have more or less have the same visual processing system. However, without a standardized way of explaining and notating our perceptions, our communication of this information becomes arbitrary and not effective when designing to display information on mobile interfaces.

Bertin (1977) organized visual information into two forms: data values and data forms. Ware (2000) introduces a more modern way of dividing data into entities and relationships.

Entities are the objects that can be visualized such as people, buildings, signs. Relationships (sometimes called "relations"), define the structures and patterns that entities share with each other. Relationships can be structural and physical, conceptual, causal, and temporal.

These entities and relationships can be further described using attributes. These are properties of both the entity and the relationship, and cannot be considered independently. Some examples of attributes are:

For each of these we mean the attribute as it applies to a specific item. Not texture in general, or the texture of paper, but the texture of a specific type of paper (or even, a specific sheet of paper).

Classifying Information

In addition to creating descriptions of our perceptions, we have also standardized a classifying way to organize them. Common classifying schemes that we use are:

Organizing With Information Architecture

Even given pen and paper, people will make lists, so it is no surprise they are the most common of interactive elements in mobiles. Lists can be adapted almost infinitely, for viewing or selection, for any size, and for any type of interaction. Now that we are able to describe the data that we perceive, we must understand how this information should be structured, organized, labeled, and identified on mobile user interfaces.

One of the most common organization structures humans have used through time is a hierarchy. A hierarchy organizes information based on divisions and parent-child relationships. When using hierarchies to organize information, Peter Morville explains rules to consider (Morville, 2006): Categories should be mutually exclusive to limit ambiguity. Consider the balance between breadth and depth. When determining the number of categories regarding breath, you must consider the user's ability to visually scan the page as well as the amount of real estate on the screen. When considering depth, limit the scope to two to three levels down. Recognize the danger of providing users with too many options.

Another way to organize information is faceting. In this, there are no parent-child relationships, just information attributes, like tags, which may be sorted or filtered to display the most appropriate information. The tags do not have to be explicit, and faceting may be accomplished by searching text descriptions, or even unusual methods such as searching for shapes, patterns or colors directly within images.

Of course, these two methods, hierarchy and faceting may be used in conjunction. A hierarchically-ordered data set can also have tags attached to it, and the facet view may combine both strict and arbitrarily ordering to display the information the user wants.

Date and location are essentially special cases, and depending on the data or needs may be approached either way, even though they are strictly defined. For example, location can be an arbitrary value, with filtering or sorting for distance around a single point. Or it may be considered as a heirarchy of continent > nation > state > county > city > address.

Organizing Data Using List Navigation

A key tactical consideration, mentioned several times in the patterns, is whether browsable data sets are circular or dead end. Circular lists simply go around and around. When at the "last" item in a list, continuing to view the next item will display the first one in the list. This is useful for faceted views, or other cases where the ordering is unimportant.

For dead end lists, there is a definitive start and stop, and (aside from links such as "back to top") there is no way to go to the other end. These are useful for information with a very ordered, single-axis display. Most hierarchies, and much date-sorted information should display like this. Such as a message list that starts with the most recent. For clarity, above the most recent message is nothing (or controls to make a new message), not the oldest message.

Very often, the manner of the data must be combined with the appropriateness of a solution to select the pattern. Carousels, for example, work best when circular, and Grids work well as dead ends.

Additional details of list navigation are detailed under the appropriate Widget section.

Information Design & Ordering Data

Grids are used for displaying ordered data like photos by date, or for user-organized information such as home pages, where they often become film strips as well. Grids can lend themselves to selection, re-organization, and even including larger items, as long as they fit in the grid.

The way people perceive attributes can be used directly to communicate the relative importance and relationship of informational elements on the page. This design of pages or states, when it falls directly from the information architecture of the entire product, can be called information design.

While many methods of considering these arrangements exist, an adequate grouping is, from most to least important. Position is, generally, more critical to communicating importance than size, which is more important than shape, and so on:

These will be discussed in detail in other chapters as well. Here, the concept is useful when determining how to relate the elements within a single informational item, and how to keep the elements adjacent items from becoming mixed. Rules and bars of color are but some of the techniques. The list above covers six categories, with hundreds of design tactics included.

It is also useful to decide what information must be present. More can be said about a good, easy to understand interactive design by what is left out of any particular view, than what is included. For each of the information displays detailed below, only a portion is shown, and details, or alternative views are available when the user takes action.

Naturally, make these decisions by following heuristics, standards, styles of design that already exist such as OS-level standards, and universal hierarchies of visual communication. Most decisions for an existing platform can be made easier by consulting the style guide. Only a few choices will exist, and these will be well understood by the users.

Patterns for Displaying Information

One good way of thinking about the entire topic of interactive design is that it's all about displaying information. This chapter in particular is concerned with components whose sole task is presenting ordered sets of information, so that users may understand and act upon them.

These patterns have been developed and refined based on how the human mind processes patterns, objects, and information: