Poster

Putting Your Design in the Crosshair: Turning to Visual Grammar to Evaluate Your Web Designs

Brian Verhoeven

As information architects we are always looking for ways to improve the user experience. We rely on many tools and processes, including user research and patterns, to design information environments that support the users and activities. Even with these existing tools and processes, one of the greatest challenges to any design process is assessing the subconscious consumption of information. We often rely on expensive user testing sessions and/or eyetracking experiments in an attempt to uncover this subconscious process. However, visual grammar provides a simple tool that may be used to help us evaluate how our designs facilitate subconscious information processing. My poster will provide Kress and Van Leeuwen's "dimensions of visual space" crosshair and explain how to use it to reliably predict the subconscious processing of any visual composition in Western culture including websites.