MIT talk: Do predictions of visual perception aid design?

Do predictions of visual perception aid design?
Speaker: Ruth Rosenholtz, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Date: Friday, February 20 2009
Time: 2:00PM to 3:00PM

Understanding and exploiting the abilities of the human visual system is an important part of the design of usable user interfaces and information visualizations. Designers traditionally learn qualitative rules-of-thumb for how to enable quick, easy and veridical perception of their design. More recently, work in human and computer vision, including in our lab, has produced more quantitative models of human perception. These models often take as input arbitrary, complex images of a design. We ask whether such models aid the design process. Through a series of interactions with designers and design teams, we find that the models can help, but in somewhat unexpected ways. Based on this study, I will suggest general design principles for perceptual tools.

Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of CSAIL. She joined MIT in 2004 after 7 years at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC). Ruth's background is in electrical engineering, particularly computer vision. More recently, however, she has studied human vision, and in particular visual search and attention. Her engineering background shows through in her focus on finding predictive mathematical models of phenomena in human vision, and in her interest in applying knowledge of human perception to the design of better user interfaces and information visualizations.