XenoAbe Design

Parallax. It may be an unfamiliar term to many. It’s defined as the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer. For example, a driver may look at a speedometer and it reads 65, but when the passenger looks on it appears to read a different speed due to the difference in angle they are viewing the speedometer from. There’s nothing different with the speedometer itself, but just the angle it is viewed from makes it appear different.

We need to view our designs from the parallax as well. Well, to clarify, we need to view them both head on and from the parallax as well. Doing this doesn’t change the content but gives us a different viewing angle of that content from which we base our designs. This can mean many different things. We can adapt this to mean designing a web app to fit a mobile experience or we can adapt it to mean moving a local machine experience to a network-based experience. Or maybe it’s just a simple (or not so simple) redesign. It’s really just about taking the same basic problem and adapting that problem for some difference in an environmental variable, but the purpose is to use these different angles to feed various POVs into our designs to improve the user experience.

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For anyone interested in some of the true theory behind HCI principles (we don’t just say stuff is better because we think it is) then this post is for you. We’ll explain what Fitt’s Law is, the basic idea behind it, and how that information can be applied practically to your applications and designs.

These design’s are giving me Fitt’s!

Fitt’s law is a mathematical formula that can calculate the difficulty it is to use two UI elements given the size and distance and of those elements. The formula is written as:

MT = a + b log₂(1+D/W)

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