Layout, Colour Paradigms & Character Sets (OCR A Level Computer Science)

Layout, Colour Paradigms & Character Sets

What is User Experience (UX)?

• User Experience (UX) design refers to the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users

• Key elements of UX design include layout, colour paradigms, and character sets, each playing a significant role in enhancing user interaction with the product

Layout in UX design

• The layout of a UX design refers to the arrangement of elements on a page or screen

• This includes the positioning of text, images, buttons, and other interactive elements.

Colour paradigms in UX design

Colour paradigms refer to the systematic use of colours in UX design to elicit specific responses from users.

• Emotional Response: Different colours can evoke different emotional responses. For example, blue is often associated with trust and stability, while red may signify urgency or importance

• Visual Contrast and Accessibility: Using contrasting colours can help highlight essential elements and improve the overall accessibility of the design for users with visual impairments

• Consistency and Branding: Consistent colour schemes can enhance the visual cohesion of the design and align with the brand identity

Character sets in UX design

• Character sets are collections of characters that a system can recognise and display

• They are crucial in UX design for presenting information to users

Impact of Ethics on UX Design

• The influence of cultural differences on the use and creation of computers and programs is substantial and multifaceted

• This can be observed in language use, character sets, reading directions, and colour interpretations, among others

Language & character sets

• Different languages use unique sets of characters, which impacts the creation and use of computer programs.

• Programs must support various character sets to cater to users worldwide

• Unicode is a widely used encoding standard that supports most of the world's writing systems, ensuring that languages are accurately represented

• Developers must consider language differences during program creation to ensure their applications can be localised, i.e., adapted to different languages and regions without engineering changes

Reading direction

• The direction in which languages are read also varies between cultures, influencing the design of user interfaces

• While languages like English read left to right, others like Arabic and Hebrew read right to left

• This affects the placement and arrangement of elements in a user interface, such as text alignment, navigation menus, and buttons

• Computer programs must support bi-directional text to accommodate both types of reading directions, ensuring usability for users across different cultures

Colour interpretation

• Cultures interpret colours differently, which can impact the user experience in computer applications

• Colours hold different meanings in different cultures

• E.g. red is often associated with danger in Western cultures but signifies luck in Chinese culture

• Developers must be mindful of these differences when choosing colour schemes for their applications

• Inappropriate colour choices could lead to misunderstandings or even offend users