Graphical Identity Support Tool (GIST)
What is the Graphical Identity Support Tool?
GIST is a tool for analysing the visual appearance of websites. It identifies variations, and similarities, in the appearance of individual web pages to show overall design features that could not easily be recognised or checked in any other way.
Ensuring consistency in the visual appearance of websites is often complicated by the layers of underlying technologies and processes that are used to generate the pages. The resulting pages can differ from the original or intended design. GIST offers web designers a way to check the accuracy and consistency of their design based on the actual appearance of the pages.
Existing clients
GIST has been used as a web analysis service by
- The DfES's Worktrain site (www.worktrain.gov.uk)
- The Workshop (www.theworkshop.co.uk)
- Portent Interaction (www.portentinteractive.com)
Why use GIST?
GIST is an ideal companion to existing website quality assurance processes or as standalone tool to ensure the design and brand consistency of your website. It assists with the management of visual identity and allows the easy identification of website anomalies. Development technologies and processes cannot compensate for checking the final result - can you afford not to check?
How does GIST work?
Unlike existing web analysis tools, GIST focuses on the user's experience of a website. It examines the appearance of the pages not the source code behind them. Because of this, the tool provides an excellent mechanism for ensuring that your website meets your customers' expectations and your branding requirements.
Specifically, GIST is given an initial sample of pages from a website and then follows the hyperlinks on them to build up a large sample of the site's content. GIST then generates an interactive scatter map of the sampled pages so that visually similar pages are near each other and dissimilar pages are far apart.
Examples
- An analysis example of the unviersity website (Sheffield Hallam University website)
- Some other examples of GIST analyses (more examples)
Reports and Papers
- 'Viewing visual web site design in context' (PDF 1.9MB) by Chris Roast (presented at DUX 2005)
- 'Getting the GIST of websites' by Chris Roast and Simon Polovina (presented at HCI 2005)
Further information
Please view our frequently asked questions section or, for more information about the Graphical Identity Support Tool (GIST), contact: Dr Chris Roast on 0114 225 2907 or email gist@shu.ac.uk.
Sheffield Hallam University is not responsible for the content of external websites
