You must have seen the 3D web and software design trend, starting with Apple’s 3D-esque interface designs of recent years, and lately boosted by the impressive PaperVision 3D for Flash. They make for beautiful, layered experiences and the sense of depth is intuitively pleasing. However, it doesn’t take much to turn a trend like this into a for-the-sake-of-it gimmick.
The key to using 3D well is to think about the psychological value of 3D to a user, and not just turning things into 3D willy nilly. People have portions of their brains that are dedicated to processing 3D visual scenes, and tapping into that is a powerful way to communicate things that have been tricky with 2D design:
Movement patterns provide a major cue in 3D – when objects move in unison (eg, rotating in a circle) there’s evidently a relationship between them. The path in space taken by the objects give up clues to whether there’s a finite set and how fast you are moving through them. Apple’s ‘coverflow’ carousel is a prominent example of using movement in space but the approach could be applied in many different ways.
Sense of place is communicated on multiple levels – 2D experience design relies on esoteric navigation constructs such as tabs and breadcrumbs to show people where they are in the overall structure of content. Although many are now common across hundreds of websites, they take some learning and are often unintuitive. In contrast, when you’re looking at a 3D scene with objects located in relative space the structure is immediately evident and familiar.
Proximity = relevance – when you have many spatial constructs, the ones in close proximity are the ones that you assume are relevant to the matter at hand. In a 2D space, this type of approach becomes a difficult task of managing clutter. Using size, location and perspective in 3D space is powerful for showing relevance, not just because of the extra dimensions but also because our brains are designed to process things that way.
Real world rules apply – unlike unique constructs built for UIs, the rules of 3D are the rules of the real world, so it’s easy to know whether you are breaking the rules based on what would make sense in the world: Objects shouldn’t appear out of nowhere, things should move predictably and with a sense of weight/mass, and so on.
Bonus: Lessons from 3D games have been learnt over years of experimentation and evolution that can now be leveraged in UI design. Video games have been building complex 3D interactive experiences for years and UI designers can actually claim some reference value from those hours of playing!
Filed under: 3D, creative delivery, information architecture, revolutions, style, trends, user interface, user-centred , 3D, design, flash, papervision3d, psychology
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