b) Graphical user interfaces 

A GUI layout (graphical user interface) as such is considered to be non-technical, being a "presentation of information" (Art. 52(2)(d) EPC; T 1741/08 citing T 1143/06). See also T 1214/09, T 1185/13.

Features concerning the graphic design of user interfaces do not have a technical effect, because their design is not based on technical considerations, but on general intellectual considerations as to which design is particularly appealing to a user (EPC Guidelines G‑II, 3.7.1 – April2025 version). For example, the colour (see T 1567/05, T 726/07, T 1734/11), shape (T 677/09), size (T 823/07, T 1237/07), layout (T 756/06, T 1741/08, T 1214/09), arrangement of items on the screen (T 643/00, T 1237/10) or the information content of a message displayed is usually not a technical aspect of a graphical user interface. An exception would be if these features contribute to achieving a particular technical effect (T 1741/08, T 1143/06).

A feature defining a presentation of information produces a technical effect if it credibly assists the user in performing a technical task by means of a continued and/or guided human-machine interaction process (T 336/14, T 1802/13 and T 1185/13). Such a technical effect is considered credibly achieved if the assistance to the user in performing the technical task is objectively, reliably and causally linked to the feature. This would not be the case if the alleged effect depends on subjective interests or preferences of the user (EPC Guidelines G‑II, 3.7 – April 2025 version).

In T 1235/07 the board took a wider view of "presentation of information" than just the actual information that is displayed, the so-called cognitive content, to include also structural aspects of how the information is displayed. This broader meaning was supported by almost the only reference to the presentation of information in the travaux préparatoires. In the board's view, such additional aspects can only contribute to inventive step if they have technical character. The board considered the circumstances of the case in hand to be similar to those in T 1143/06, but they were even less convincing because the invention was merely a visual display of a known analysis technique using known means, whereas in T 1143/06 the idea of varying the speed of the element was at least not known.

In T 211/21 the board held that to complement automatisation with human intervention, providing means enabling a skilled artisan to actively intervene in an automated process for producing foods and to provide a backup to pre-programmed procedures was an obvious measure. Including a user interface having two separate push-buttons to enable the skilled artisan to send a request for assistance and for triggering data transmission was also considered to be obvious by the board. User interfaces having touch buttons are commonly used in the field.

In T 1245/20 the application related to methods of identifying an application type of unknown data that may be encountered during a data recovery process. The board held that the construction of the mapping according to the claimed invention was performed based on non-technical rather than technical considerations. The mapping itself was also considered to be non-technical. The board was also not convinced that there was a credible increase in the speed of the mapping of the retrieved data to a particular application type over the whole scope of the claim. One question that arose was whether the method of claim 1 had the potential to cause technical effects. But the mapping and display of the data record in a respective column of the user interface resulting from the claimed method was not specifically adapted for any technical use (G 1/19).

In T 2760/18 the appellant argued that it was not necessary to describe in the application how a user should use the claimed GUI for navigation as this was intuitive. The board did not find this argument convincing because intuition is subjective. It depends on personal factors, such as experience, preferences and cognitive abilities (T 407/11). A credibly achieved technical effect, however, requires an objective and reliable link between the feature and the effect. Since the effect of improved navigation depended on the user's intuition, i.e. on the user's subjective evaluation, it was not credibly achieved.

In T 415/21, the board held that the distinguishing features concerned a graphical user interface (GUI) and presentation of information. While the layout of a GUI was usually not considered to be technical, a user-interface element that the user could activate to trigger an associated action was a technical part of the user interface (T 2028/11).

i) Broken technical chain

In T 1741/08 the board made clear that "lowering the cognitive burden of the user" is not of itself a technical effect (T 1143/06 followed, T 49/04 not followed). It found that the reduction in use of resources would be caused by the way the brain of the user perceives and processes the visual information given by a particular way of presenting information. The appellant also argued that there was a chain of effects. But in terms of technical effects this was a broken chain. The board did not accept that such a broken chain could be used as evidence of the required technical effect overall ("broken-technical-chain fallacy"; see also T 158/88, T 603/89 and T 1670/07). Following T 1143/06, the board considered a GUI layout as such to be non-technical, being a "presentation of information" (Art. 52(2)(d) EPC).

In T 1670/07 the board confirmed the "broken-technical-chain fallacy" (T 1741/08) and cited T 603/89 and T 1670/07 as examples. The board held that the possible final technical effect brought about by the action of a user could not be used to establish an overall technical effect because it was conditional on the mental activities of the user.

In T 1214/09 turned on whether improving a human's cognitive evaluation of certain information by changing the manner in which the information is presented was non-technical. The board considered the alleged effect not to be a technical effect since in the context of this invention any improvement in the efficiency of image retrieval can only be the result of the non-technical improvement in the user's evaluation of the displayed thumbnail file images.

In T 306/10 the board cited T 1741/08 and decided that the selection of an item for recommendation to a user did not qualify as a technical purpose (see also T 1869/08). From a technical point of view the recommendations were irrelevant, because while making "good" or "bad" recommendations might lead to different user reactions and thereby, in the end, to different technical results, such results did not qualify as a technical effect of the recommendations, as they depended on subjective choices made by the user. The board in T 183/21 held that while recommending products was not generally recognised as having technical character, the technical effect of the distinguishing features was that the use of network bandwidth required to provide the training data to the recommender system was minimised, as was the amount of storage necessary for storing said training data in the communications system. The amount of training data was indirectly limited via the tendency/convergence of the measured performance metric towards, or oscillation around, the predetermined level of recommendation performance, which was not necessarily the maximum achievable level of recommendation performance. The board came to the conclusion that this technical effect was achieved.

In T 1834/10 a web page is made more attractive to potential customers by presenting images in a lively manner, and the images to be presented are selected and displayed automatically so that the presentation can be changed rapidly. The board noted that however innovative an attractive content selection may be, it related to a presentation of information which was a priori non-technical (Art. 52(2)(d) EPC), even if it lowers a user's cognitive burden (T 1741/08) or prompts the user to start some technical action (broken technical chain, T 1741/08, T 1670/07).

The board in T 49/04 decided otherwise, finding that technical aspects could not be ruled out in the design and use of a graphic interface. Furthermore, the presentation of natural language text on a display in a manner which improved readability, enabling users to perform their task more efficiently, related to how, i.e. by what physical arrangement of the text, cognitive content was conveyed to the reader and could thus be considered as contributing a technical solution to a technical problem.

In T 619/98 it was held that an action performed by a user in response to a message in the form of questions or suggestions concerning the technical functioning of an apparatus did not render the form of the information technical. The board in T 1143/06 came to the same conclusion, holding that an action (possibly) performed by a user in response to a message concerning the technical functioning of an apparatus did not necessarily render technical the information conveyed. The board came to the conclusion that the information provided according to the relevant features could not credibly support a continued and guided human-machine interaction process. Thus, it could not assist the user in performing the technical task. It only addressed the human mental process of an "average user", however the latter was supposed to be defined based on personal skills and preferences (see e.g. T 407/11).

In T 752/19 the board held that improved patient compliance to a pharmaceutical formulation could not be used to establish an overall technical effect if it was the result of a "broken technical chain", namely an alleged chain of technical effects starting with information provided to a patient, which was then broken by the patient's mental activities.

ii) Features of the graphic design

In T 244/00 the board stated that the graphic design of menus was, as a rule, not a technical aspect of a menu-driven control system (see T 154/04, OJ 2008, 46; T 125/04, T 1143/06).

T 333/95 concerned using a computer to produce animations. However, the board in that case clearly considered the feature of "making said graphics object the current cursor" as a technical feature per se. This "graphics object cursor" replaced the normal cursor (also technical) and its movements were recorded and translated into a kind of programming language. There was at least a technical effect in allowing the user to move the selected object around under control of the mouse.

In T 125/04 the board stated that, in general, the task of designing diagrams is non-technical. This is so even if the diagrams arguably convey information in way which a viewer may intuitively regard as particularly appealing, lucid or logical. In T 125/04 the invention, like T 643/00, also concerned an arrangement of images but was different in that only the information conveyed by the images, i.e. their "cognitive content" (see T 1194/97, OJ 2000, 525), was relevant. The new features had to do with how this content was represented. Unlike T 643/00, the invention provided no information about the computer system itself, such as the location where the data are stored.

In T 1073/06, the underlying GUI was configured, upon user input, to display objects of a simulation model, including graphical link representations to improve the ease of a user's comprehension of the model. The deciding board held that an improvement in the comprehension of a model is a purely mental effect, so that the problem solved was not seen as being technical.

iii) Support in performing a technical task

In T 1741/08 the board held that not everything that supports a technical task has itself a technical character.

In T 1802/13 the issue was "how" specific cognitive data was actually presented rather than "what" was presented. The crucial consideration was therefore that the feature involved presenting cognitive content which addressed solely the user's mental process. It was established case law of the boards of appeal that, as a general rule, "lowering the cognitive burden of a user" could not, per se, be considered to be a technical effect (see e.g. T 1741/08, T 1539/09, T 1237/10 and T 1105/17).

In T 336/14 the board held that in the assessment of inventive step of a claim, in which the non-technical features relate to cognitive content presented to the user of a graphical user interface, i.e. relate to "what" is presented rather than "how" something is presented, it has to be analysed whether the GUI together with the content presented credibly assists the user in performing a technical task (related to "why" that content is presented) by means of a continued and/or guided human-machine interaction process. It has to be established whether the information supplied based on the relevant features credibly enable the user to properly operate the technical system in question, or whether it only addresses the human mental process of an "average user" (on this point, see also T 1895/17 and T 772/18).

In T 374/21 the boad negated any parallels with T 336/14 as drawn by the appellant. It explained that in T 336/14, a distinction had been made between information indicating an operation state, a condition, or an event internal to the underlying technical system, prompting the system user to interact with it in a continued and/or guided way for enabling its proper functioning on the one hand, and information representing a state of a non-technical application run on that technical system on the other hand. The former was considered to be technical whereas the latter was not. In the context of the present invention, which concerned a computer-implemented trading tool for generating and displaying trading information and trading strategies for an option, the underlying technical system would be the computer system. However, the user rather interacted with data relating to the price of an asset i.e. cognitive data which lacked technical function and character. Thus, the boad held that the present invention fell into the second, non-technical category of information mentioned in T 336/14.

In T 690/11 the invention concerned a dialysis system which comprised a display device, a web server and web browser operating with the display device to display information that could guide an operator through the set-up procedure for performing a dialysis treatment and then illustrate the progress of that treatment. In the board's opinion, the claimed features possessed more than mere information content directed exclusively to the human mind. The claimed display related to the interaction between the system and the operator and hence, implied technical means for the transmission and handling of respective signals contributing to the correct operation of the system. This conferred a technical character on the claimed features.

In T 297/20 the board held that the mere change, by an operator, of the degree of abstraction of a graphical view ("condensation") of a power grid did not credibly assist a user in performing a technical task by means of a continued and/or guided human-machine interaction process within the meaning of T 336/14 and T 1802/13 and thus could not bring about a technical effect.