GUI design based on cognitive psychology: Theoretical, empirical and practical approaches

This paper presents a study on the effectiveness of applying cognitive psychology in designing the graphical user interface (GUI). The study focuses on three main aspects of cognitive psychology which are the human memory limitation, perception, and attention. Based on these aspects, some related and well defined principles had been explored. Experiments had been carried out in order to find out whether the current GUI design follows those well defined principles in fulfilling the requirements of the aspects. Survey had also been conducted to find out the user preferences in GUI. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the cognitive psychology theories presented in this study were considers as an important aspect when designing an effective GUI.