Visual Thinking: for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

we can recognize that we have seen something before far more easily than we can reconstruct a memory.

It is not enough to look at many visual designs; each must be subjected to a visual critique for these skills to develop.

that a line can represent many things because of the flexible interpretive pattern-finding capability of the visual system.

Computer-based cognitive tools are developing with great speed in human society, far faster than the human brain can evolve.

Computer programs

The quickest and most practical method for drilling down is the mouse-over hover query.

There is a basic cycle of attention. Between one and three times a second our brains query the visual environment, activate an eye movement to pick up more information, process it, and re-query. The information picked up becomes the content of visual working memory. This cycle provides the basic low-level temporal structure of the cognitive thread.

The special skill of designers is not so much skill with drawing or graphic design software, although these are undoubtedly useful, but the talent to analyze a design in terms of its ability to support the visual queries of others.

Trying to find a target based on two features is called a visual conjunctive search, and most visual conjunctions are hard to see.

designers must have an additional skill. They must see critically. This is very different from simply seeing that a pattern is present and using that pattern for some cognitive task like finding a route using a map. The map designer must critically analyze which combinations of patterns will provide the best support for the set of cognitive tasks a