History of screen design

Answer 1

A brief history of Computer Screen Design will be of great interest to web designers from Mumbai as well as as those from other cities and countries. While developers have been designing screens since a cathode ray tube display was first attached to a computer, more widespread interest in the application of good design principles to screens did not begin to emerge until the early 1970s, when IBM introduced its 3270 cathode ray tube text-based terminal. The 3270 was used in myriad ways in the office, and company-specific guidelines for good screen design occasionally began to surface (e.g., Galitz and DiMatteo, 1974).

Typically, however, design at this time period had little to guide it because it was driven by hardware and telephone line transmission issues. A1970's screen usually consisted of many fields with very cryptic and often unintelligible captions. It was visually cluttered and often possessed a command field that challenged the user to remember what had to be keyed into it. Ambiguous messages often required referral to a manual to interpret.

Effectively using this kind of screen required a great deal of practice and patience. Most early screens were monochromatic, typically presenting green text on black backgrounds. At the turn of the decade, guidelines for text-based screen design were finally made widely available (Galitz, 1980, 1981) and many screens began to take on a much less cluttered look through concepts such as grouping and alignment of elements, as shown in Figure 1.2.

User memory was supported by providing clear and meaningful field captions and by listing commands on the screen, and enabling them to be applied through function keys. Messages also became clearer. These screens were not entirely clutter-free, however. Instructions and reminders to the user had to be inscribed on the screen in the form of prompts or completion aids such as the codes PR and SC.

Not all1980's screens looked like this, however. In the 1980s, 1970s-type screens were still being designed, and some reside in old systems today. The advent of graphics yielded another milestone in the evolution of screen design. While some basic design principles did not change, such as groupings and alignment, borders were made available to visually enhance groupings, and buttons and menus for implementing commands replaced function keys. Multiple properties of elements were also provided, including different font sizes and styles, line thickness, and colours. The entry field was supplemented by many other kinds of controls, including list boxes, drop-down combination boxes, spin boxes, and so forth.

These new controls were much more effective in supporting a person's memory, now simply allowing for selection from a list instead of requiring a remembered key entry. Completion aids disappeared from screens, replaced by new listing controls. Screens could also be simplified, the much more powerful computers being able to quickly present a new screen. In the 1990's our knowledge concerning what makes effective screen design continued to expand. Coupled with ever-improving technology, the result was even greater improvements in the user-computer screen interface as the new century dawned.