Designing Naturally With Gestalt in Mind

Do you ever find yourself at a loss for words?

Perhaps you said something like "could you bring me that thingamabob over there?"

If we don't know the right words, we fumble around talking about layouts with comments like "it's too loose" or "could you clean that up" or even "what were you trying to do?"

Many of our readers who have taken HFI's Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design course have heard the principles of "gestalt" as applied to layout. As an HFI instructor I was very pleased and impressed when Phil Goddard updated this course in 2004 with a module on gestalt principles.

Recently, I found a 2002 paper that covered this topic in a systematic fashion. The paper reminds us that indeed there IS a vocabulary for discussing layouts that are simple, compelling, and "naturally attractive".

Let's see how to talk about layout. Your professional vocabulary sets you apart and makes you a valuable expert on things no-one else knows.

First, we can say "naturally attractive" because Gestalt psychology was all about nature's design of the brain for visual perception.

Back in the 1930s perceptual psychologists asked the question, how does the untrained mind make visual sense of the jumble of colors, lines, and shapes that we see?

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