A Case Study Exploring Users’ Perceptions and Expectations of Shapes for Dialog Designs

Shape is a fundamental visual characteristic in the design of common UI components like buttons, switches, and dialogs. It has commonly been used to enhance the visual aesthetic of a UI, or to express a distinct perspective in style or brand. However, it remains understudied how the shape of UI components convey semantic meaning and impact user perception of the information displayed in those UI components. As a first step to address this gap, we chose to study the dialog UI component. We first explored the shape of a dialog and created 6 different designs (e.g., dialogs with rounded corners, circle, and wiggly-circle) for an online survey study with 200 participants. We examined whether different dialog designs alter user perceptions and expectations of different messages displayed within them. This work serves as a practical study to explore the opportunity for shapes to be used intentionally in UI design.