Variable Content De-emphasis via Relevance Scoring
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current user interface displays overwhelm users with excessive content, making it cumbersome to focus on relevant information, as existing filtering methods require navigating back to previous layouts to review removed content.
Innovation Solution
The system de-emphasizes certain content in a user interface display by modifying its display characteristics, such as saturation, opacity, and contrast, based on a relevancy score, allowing users to focus on specific elements without removing the surrounding content, thus maintaining the layout and providing a better navigation experience.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If filtering is applied to display only relevant content, then user focus on relevant information is improved, but user ability to review removed content deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different visual properties to different content items based on their relevance score. Relevant content items are displayed with normal visual properties, while less relevant items are de-emphasized through reduced opacity, saturation, or other visual modifications. This allows all content to remain visible simultaneously with different emphasis levels, resolving the contradiction between filtering for focus and maintaining access to all content.
2Loss of information
If all content is displayed, then user awareness of available options is improved, but user focus on specific elements deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent modifies visual properties of content items including color saturation, opacity, and contrast based on relevance scoring. Less relevant content items have their saturation and opacity reduced, making them visually less prominent while still visible. This allows users to maintain awareness of all available content while automatically directing attention to higher-priority elements through visual hierarchy.
3Ease of operation
If content is removed from display, then user distraction is reduced, but navigation efficiency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of completely removing less relevant content from the display, the patent applies partial de-emphasis through visual modifications such as reduced opacity or saturation. This partial action maintains the content's presence and accessibility while reducing its visual impact, allowing users to review content without navigation overhead while still achieving focus management for primary content.
Data Source
AI summary
User interface display layouts are provided that draw a user's attention to a specific element or elements by de-emphasizing the surrounding content, but without removing the de-emphasized content from the interface. This ability to maintain the whole presentable layout with visibility layers and without layout changes provides a useful navigation experience for the user as it is clear where the user's attention should go and yet the surrounding content is still subtly there, constantly reminding the user of the other available content. De-emphasis of certain content items is achieved by modifying display characteristics of those content items relative to a base display level, for example by lowering saturation, lowering opacity, and/or de-focusing (as if the user is looking through a camera) and modification can be done variably. Driven by a relevancy score, each content item in a display layout can be de-emphasized more or less depending on which content is more meaningful to the user's filtering actions.