Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3 Semiotic Design and
Evaluation Framework
3.1 UI LANGUAGE COMPONENTS
The visible and interaction language is expressed through UI components. On a gen-
eral level, UI components concern how a human-computer system works by means of
intrinsic metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance (Marcus,
2009, p. 9):
Metaphors: Essential concepts in words, images, sounds, touch
Mental models: Organization of data, functions, tasks, roles of people at
work or play, static or mobile
Navigation: Movement through mental models via windows, dialogue boxes,
buttons, links, etc.
Interaction: Input/output techniques, feedback, overall behavior of systems
and people
Appearance: Visual-verbal, acoustic, tactile qualities
Looking at the UI components from the language perspective, we can structure
them organically to create a UI grammar. UI grammar is composed of basic elements:
interaction sentence, interaction games, rhetorical tropes, interaction phases, and pat-
terns. The grammar elements concern both the noun and verb phrase of a sentence.
Discrete elements are the smallest elements to have a meaning. The interaction sen-
tence is a meaningful unit describing a task in a user's interaction. A set of interaction
sentences with the same goal forms an interaction game. The narrative in UI is made
both by the designer's metacommunication and the temporal aspect of perceiving
UI elements. Rhetorical tropes are devices of persuasion and emphasis, often pre-
sented as metaphors. Patterns are typical configurations of UI language components
in different settings. From the defined semiotic and UI language principles, we ex-
tracted a set of heuristics that could be used as an UI glossary both for evaluation and
design.
3.1.1
D ISCRETE ELEMENTS
Discrete elements are the smallest elements to have a meaning. In linguistics they
are called morphemes, or sememes in semantics. Morphemes modify the lexemes,
for example in the lexeme “mouse-down” the morpheme is “-down.” The smallest
elements without a semantic meaning are called graphemes. In written language they
would include letters of the alphabet or strokes in Chinese characters; in the UI they
are present as affordances communicating attributes, such as shapes, shadows, or
colors (see Gibson, 1977; Norman, 2002).
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