Semiotics and technology examines how semiotics can be applied to user interface design. It discusses three categories in Peircean semiotics - firstness, secondness, and thirdness - which relate to qualities, reactions, and representations. Effective user interface design requires a two-tiered communicative process where the designer communicates to the user how to interact with the system. A semiotic approach helps designers make interface choices that convey use effectively and support productive user activity through a secure framework.

1. Semiotics and
Technology

2. Peircean Semiotics
• All signs are made up of three parts.
• Abstraction (signified)
• Reality
• Law (Signifier)
• Categories are frequently referred to as:
• Firstness – Quality of Feeling
• Secondness – Reaction, resistance, relation
• Thirdness – Representation, mediation

3. Firstness: Thirdness:
•icons – likeness •symbols – meanings by use
•potential •laws
•pure abstraction •habitual regulations
•chaos – pure potential •patterns – govern other 2 categories
Secondness:
•indexes – point to things
•existence
•fact
•conflict - opposition

4. Examples
Decoratives
Firstness: Icon Informatives
Thirdness: Law
Promote
Red LightFeeling Assert Red Lights
Stop atPropositions
Secondness: Reality
Indicatives
Car Stops
Provoke Action

5. A semiotic engineering approach to
user interface design
• The defining trait of our semiotic engineering
approach is that software artifacts are meta-
communication artifacts. They are one-shot
messages sent from designers to users about the
range of messages users can exchange with systems
in order to achieve certain effects.
• Effective HCI can only be achieved if both levels of
communication are successful in their particular
way.
• Two-tiered communicative process involving designer- to-
user communication and user-system interaction.
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza*, Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa, Raquel Oliveira Prates

6. So…
• The role of a semiotic theory in this perspective is then
to tell designers how they should
• make the communicative choices, so that the interactive system
is good, and
• convey their choice to users so that this communication does not
get in the way of interaction, but serves as a secure scaffold for
productive user activity.

8. 111 113 133 333
decoratives, diagrams, words, texts,
colors, charts, phrases, stories,
shapes, etc graphs headings reports
112 123 233
images, indices, sentences,
illustrations tables, captions,
ID tags headlines
122 223
signals, rituals,
arrows, routines,
bullets prompts
222
action
triggers,
animation,
tabs