Improving readability

I found this interesting blog series on what the author calls "readability", basically the same thing we mean when we talk about affordances and signifies.

Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - Empathy
Part 3 - Data
Part 4 - not published yet.

Follow the authors instructions and look at Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk - The conclusions drawn from the pasta sauce experiment are, in my opinion, of grave importance to what we are trying to do here.

Universals are not the answer! What we should instead strive for (and this is perhaps beyond the scope of this thesis) are where user preferences cluster and then design for this divergence. This is already a tendency that can be detected in games like Call of Duty 4 and Mirror's Edge - that give the player (at least some) control of the amount of information that the HUD should provide (note that these design decisions also affect gameplay to a grate extent).