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A Picture Is Worth … It Depends
Published in Patricia A. Robinson, Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings, 2019
Use the principles of good visual design to help focus the reader’s attention and to avoid confusion: The eye moves along lines, not across them. Use line direction to lead your reader’s eye to the central focus of the graphic.Bigger or more detailed objects will seem more important than smaller or less detailed ones.Similar shapes (in a block diagram, for example) will suggest similar function.Provide plenty of white space around and within a graphic. White space can help the user organize visual information, reduce clutter, and serve as a de facto “frame” around a graphic. Sometimes, all a confusing or cluttered illustration needs is a bit of white space to become more inviting to use.
Partitioning-Based Methods
Published in Charles J. Alpert, Dinesh P. Mehta, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Handbook of Algorithms for Physical Design Automation, 2008
Management of whitespace (also known as free space) is a key issue in physical design as it has a profound effect on the quality of a placement. The amount of whitespace in a design is the difference between the total placeable area in a design and the total movable cell area in the design. A natural scheme for managing whitespace in top-down placement, uniform whitespace allocation, was introduced and analyzed in Ref. [12]. Let a placement bin to be partitioned have site area S, cell area C, absolute whitespace W = max{S − C, 0}, and relative whitespace w = W/S. A bipartitioning divides the bin into two child bins with site areas S0 and S1 such that S0 + S1 = S and cell areas C0 and C1 such that C0 + C1 = C. A partitioner is given cell area targets T0 and T1 as well as a tolerance τ for a bipartitioning instance. τ defines the maximum percentage by which C0 and C1 are allowed to differ from T0 and T1, respectively. In many cases of bipartitioning, T0=T1=c2 but this is not always true [5].
Assessing the Visual Esthetics of User Interfaces: A Ten-Year Systematic Mapping
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2022
Adriano Luiz de Souza Lima, Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim
The layout features include symmetry, grid quality, white space, and the number of alignment points. The symmetry feature indicates how much the left side of an image matches with the right side. It can be measured through the ratio of matching contour pixels across the central vertical axis to all GUI contour pixels (Miniukovich & De Angeli, 2014a, 2014b). Another measurement technique segments the GUI into visual blocks (Cao et al., 2010) and analyzes their shift from the central vertical axis when it crosses the blocks or from a matching block across that axis (Miniukovich & De Angeli, 2015a; Miniukovich et al., 2018). The GUI segmentation into visual blocks also allows measuring the grid quality and white space. Grid quality is based on the number of visual blocks, the number of alignment points of blocks, the number of block sizes, and the proportion of the GUI that is covered by same-size blocks (Balinsky, 2006) when applied to web GUIs (Miniukovich & De Angeli, 2015a). On the other hand, the grid quality of mobile GUIs is based on the number of vertical block sizes instead of the number of visual blocks and the number of alignment points of blocks, considering that mobile GUIs often display elements in a single-aligned column. As a layout component, white space is the area that is not covered by visual blocks (Miniukovich & De Angeli, 2015a). When the segmentation of GUIs uses the Quadtree decomposition, which is the recursive division of GUI images into four sub-images until they are sufficiently uniform, it results in large content-free areas and also content-dense squares (Miniukovich et al., 2018). With this method, white space is considered the number of 64-pixel and 128-pixel squares, where the number of alignment points is the count of vertically aligned block points in a GUI (Miniukovich et al., 2018).