The popularity of Graphical User Interface has made it indispensable not only in the field of computer but also in other consumer items like TV, mobile phone, camera etc. Although the current-day GUIs are way ahead of the GUIs of a decade ago, various aspects of a GUI still have several limitations and are going through continuous innovations.

TRIZ provides various techniques like “Ideality”, “Functionality”, “Trends”, “Inventive Principles” etc. to solve the prior art problems and improve the capabilities of any product. The concept of ideality is applied to explore the ideal features of a GUI, such as, easy to develop, easy to operate, easy to navigate, better aesthetics, increased speed of operation, lesser errors and so on. Many contradictions are faced on the way to achieve the Ideality, such as, “displaying more visual elements but without expanding screen size”, “scrolling the screen but without sacrificing space for the scrollbars”, “customizing the GUI but without wasting user’s time and effort to customize it” etc.

This book cites more than 100 exemplary inventions from US Patent Database and illustrates how the contradictions in the prior art methods have been overcome by applying very simple but innovative concepts. This book is intended to be a good reference for the TRIZ researchers, GUI developers and IT inventors.