Screen Design Research

Good screen design should fulfill the following expectations :  

- focus your attention on important information

- attract and maintain your interest
- promote the integration of new information with things you've learned before
- help you find and organize information easily by making it easy to navigate through the information

Aspects to have Good Screen Design

Color

Materials should be designed in shades of gray, black and white first, with color added later in a fashion which adds to instructional effectiveness. Here are the reasons why this is good advice:

• many people suffer from some type of color deficiency ranging from weakness in certain colors, mainly red and green, to full loss of color (it is estimated that 8% of the population experience some type of color deficiency ). 
• aging also affects the perception of colors
• users may be accessing your design via monochrome monitors - if important distinctions are shown by varying colors, this information will not be available to these users.

The cognitive uses of color involve:

• highlighting salient features
• color coding, which may help with retrieval of information
• decreasing the cognitive load by using colors with accepted meanings - ie. red - stop, yellow - caution, green - go)
• simplifying complex information - using color to organize information by differences or relationships

Icons, Buttons & Menus

Rules for Buttons, Boxes and Menus: 

• Buttons, radio buttons, check boxes and menus should look like something you would normally press, click, put x's in, or pull down [3, 4]. HTML includes special routines which draw radio buttons, check boxes and pull down menus for you. The design of buttons is a bit trickier, since you have to draw your own graphic and make it look like a button (bevelled edges give the 3D effect which makes a graphic look like something you would press).
• Give the user some feedback that execution is occurring after a button is pressed. This was much harder in the past, but with the addition of Javascript to the newer web browsers, icons will flash or change color when pressed, giving the user the sense that something may happen.

Icons

Icons can be very useful when designing navigation aids, but they also have their pitfalls. Advantages of icons include:

• to help users work smarter by improving productivity and reliability (road signs can read at twice the distance and half the time as word signs (Horton, 1994))

• to represent visual and spatial concepts such as shape, color, position, angle, size, texture, and pattern

• to save space in crowded screen displays

• to speed search (we can recognize icons much more quickly that reading a list of words)

• for better recall and immediate recognition (Both Braden and Horton cite studies where graphic recall is close to 100% accurate

• to allow illiterate or semi-literate users to function more easily

• to increase global access to your web page or multimedia product.