Question

What is thirteen principles of display design in the manufacturing industry. Give examples.

Answer 1

They are :

1. Make display legible/audible
The contrast of the display, the visual angle (location), illumination, noise, masking, etc the salience of the display should be clearly visible by drivers.

2. Avoid absolute judgment limits
Instead of showing gradually changing colors, it is better to show discrete changing of colors, e.g. divided into 5 distinct levels, so it’s easily distinguishable.

3. Top-down processing
People perceive & interpret signals according to what they expect on the basis of their past experience, e.g. if a series of buttons have “pressed=on”, then the last button can’t be “pressed=off”.

4. Redundancy gain
A very good example is the traffic light, as the 3 states of information are coded into both positions (top middle bottom) and colors (red amber green).

5. Discriminability. Similarity causes confusion: use discriminable elements.
Using texts in displaying information while driving may run into this problem, e.g. “there’s a traffic 3125 meters ahead” and “there’s a traffic 2125 meters ahead” are too similar.

6. Principle of pictorial realism
A good example is showing high and low speed on a vertical scale instead of horizontal scale, because top to bottom is more easily understood as high to low, compared to right to left.

7. Principle of moving part
A good example is showing more lines in order to indicate more distance to the car ahead and less lines to indicate less distance, instead of the other way around.

8. Minimizing information access cost
A driver should not spend too much time for finding the correct information source. For example, if the color changes of a display is the most important source of information, then it should be the most salient. Another example of making the lowest access cost is to have the display area quite small so that user doesn’t have to find display elements in a too wide area.

9. Proximity compatibility principle
This is something to do with mental model. For example, similarly functioning buttons are supposed to be closer together than other buttons, or maybe more similar colors or patterns. This principle can complete the principle 8 above of having close proximity or smaller area of searching for a display element.

10. Principle of multiple resources
This is something to do with multimodality. Two information sources visually and auditorily can more easily be perceived than using both visual channels. For example, a navigation map showing a city name and speech saying “you are 500 meters from your destination” are easily perceived compared to putting the “500 meters from your destination” as a text over the map.

11. Replace memory with visual information: knowledge in the world
This can be called the principle of ecological display. Showing something that directly resembles what’s happening on the real world. The more similar to the real world, the more informative it is and user can more easily decode the information.

12. Principle of predictive aiding
Predictive display would pro-actively showing something to users about possible future happening, instead of reactively respond to user’s actions. This is especially important during driving, as it’s time critical. For example, a navigation system can show a segmented or dotted line showing the direction of the car towards a place where a road disturbance is happening. This way, the driver can quickly understands and try to change the path to other roads.

13. Principle of consistency
This is somehow related to long-term memory information. Previous knowledge of a certain way of information display would be used again when users meet another information display of the same signal. Using a commonly known display element/symbol in order to convey different information, simply would not work.