Graphical user interfaces (GUIs)

Graphical user interfaces have become more important and more prevalent as the Internet has grown beyond its early simplicity. At Interpix Design, we believe that In the present and the future of graphical user interfaces, there will be the need for more user testing and usability than ever before.

Brief overview of the GUI
By definition the graphical user interface (GUI) is any user interface that offers graphical icons (images, icons, etc.) to interact with. Today, graphics are particularly important in small hand-held devices such as cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, etc. of course, they are still very important to websites viewed on larger monitors and are very popular in social media websites and applications. Graphical user interface design and usability is critical to the function of many technologies and ought to be tested and assessed constantly. In a very few cases, graphics and iconography applied to interfaces can rely on people's intuitive abilities or on previously familiar designs implement in (for example) popular Microsoft products or Apple products.

With the advent of new technologies that continue to compress knowledge and interaction time, the use of images and other graphics in any kind of GUI becomes more complex and more critical to the success of a product, all the time. As interface design struggles to keep up with the changes made available by new technologies the need for usability testing, usability expertise and deep understanding of human-computer-interaction becomes more critical to the development of new products, new websites, applications and other interactions.

In GUI theory, there are four common elements to the user interface. Adopted from the personal computer model, these elements make up the WIMP ("window, icon, menu, pointing device") model. Today, we may are moving into the post-WIMP era, with the advent of touchscreens, SMART boards and 3D environments (Google Earth and Street View anticipate this, for example).

As GUIs incorporate an increasing amount of features, design parameters change and designing a visual composition that incorporates changes remains important, in order to fully enhance and implement a pleasing, practical interaction between user and product. Usability is absolutely ritical to the success of innovations and of branded products. The visual language of an interface must be tailored to the tasks the product is created to perform.

There are a number of ways this is done, including testing, interaction design using eye tracking or model view control which allows the user to move interaction elements around to create a product that he or she finds useful.

At Interpix Design we have applied these practices in ten years of experience that includes the design of information kiosks and other in-field interactions that anticipate and in fact are influencing some next generation interactions. Call us to learn more.