Gestalt principles primer for interaction design

If you design interfaces on any level, you need to know about Gestalt Principles. I'm sure any designer reading this will be in granny sucking eggs territory, so this one is for the project managers, the business reps and the tech developers...



I came across this stuff a few years ago and I kind of knew it all but without ever thinking about pulling it together, so having a reference point since then has been really useful. And I really like this article as it goes through these fundamental rules clearly and succinctly and picks some nice examples to illustrate.

Author of the blog post, Carolann Bonner says:

Gestalt is a term used in psychology which expresses the idea that the whole of something is more important to our understanding than the individual parts. The Gestalt principles describe the way our mind interprets visual elements.

The principles she then goes on to cover are:

• Similarity
• Enclosure
• Continuation
• Closure
• Proximity
• Figure-Ground

Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions - article by Carolann Bonner for Thoughtbot.com