Gestalt Principles Applied To Software Engineering Diagrams: An Initial Study

Discovering root-causes of comprehension errors in software design is important to prevent their presence in software systems. This research synthesizes software engineering and Gestalt principles of similarity, proximity, and continuity for the purpose of discovering whether certain visual attributes of diagrams (dashed arrows, severe complexity, etc.) can affect the accuracy and efficiency of understanding correct relationships amongst the entities in the diagram. Twenty-seven subjects viewed diagrams of different types and answered questions about them. The experiment tested whether two dependent variables, accuracy and response time, were significantly affected by independent variables, diagram type (simple 1, simple2, complex), Gestalt principles (good vs. bad), and forward/backward (question order). The results of this study indicated that the Gestalt principles did affect the comprehension in the complex diagrams.