Toward an Ideal Guide for Display Designers

A Utopian ideal has been proposed in the form of an integrated guide to the design of displays for complex systems. This ideal guide would combine the latest knowledge in the form of principles, methods, human performance data and hardware performance data in such a way that a user could enter the guide from a problem in any phase of display development and obtain the best guidance possible. A closer, more realistic look at the problems involved has suggested that the state of the art today would permit a giant step toward the ideal and that, given proper support (which is feasible though unlikely), a guide could be produced and maintained that would be significantly closer to the ideal than are today's references.