The Semiotics of User Interface Redesign

User interface design is still more of an art than a science. Interface design and redesign is mostly based on empirical studies or prototypes but there is still surprisingly little theoretical or engineering understanding of how to go about the design process and produce good designs the first time around. We present a semiotic analysis that explains features of some user interface redesigns taken from the literature and propose that our semiotic analysis can help designers explain the changes they make to potentially help them produce user interfaces that will require less redesign.