Daniel R. Stewart, Graphic Designer

We see trends for information whether we conciously acknowledge them or not. Street signs are fairly generic. There is always a system that repeats, not just for brand consistency but for knowing exactly what you’re getting into. Red means stop, error, failure, etc.

Computer interfaces follow a system of similar predictability. It’s ironic when the inventor of the graphic user interface was Xerox. Seems fitting for redundancy. All windows follow a pattern of operation buttons here, resize there. Scroll here, display there, etc. These are all following the same pattern on the top 3 operating systems in the world.

Despite many years of improvement on operating systems, there still hasn’t been much change. The reasons are twofold:

They are already very familiar. Why change something that we know how to use already? Sure, it’s not revolutionary, or even more than a minor change, but that’s the point. The biggest real change was the integration of the taskbar in Windows, otherwise known as the dock on the Macintosh operating system 10.x

Filed under: graphic design, interaction design, user experience