How to Stay Attention" by Susan Weinshenk. “100 main principles of design. How to Maintain Attention" Susan Weinshenk 100 Essential Design Principles

Susan Weinshenk

100 Essential Design Principles

In memory of Miles and Janet Schwartz. It's a pity that you won't be able to read this book.

Acknowledgments

A huge thank you to my entire great team at Peachpit, especially my editor Jeff Riley, with whom I exchanged daily emails. Thanks to Michael Nolan for his assistance in writing this book. Thanks to Guthrie Weinschenk for the photos, Maisie Weinschenk for the great ideas, and Peter Weinschenk for his support and patience. And thanks to all those who read my blog, come to my presentations, and generally listen to me when I talk about psychology. You express valuable ideas, opinions, and that is why I continue to write about psychology and design.

Psychology of Design

Whether you're creating a website, medical equipment, or any other product, your target audience is made up of people who deserve good design.

And it is your direct responsibility to know your target audience well.

How do people think? How do they make decisions? What makes a person click a button or buy something? How to get people to do what you want?

You will learn about all this from this book. You'll learn how to grab people's attention, what mistakes they make and why, and much more that will help make your design better.

And you can actually improve the design - because I've already done most of the hard work for you.

I belong to that strange category of people who love to delve into research, rummage through a huge amount of materials. So I read, and sometimes re-read it dozens of books and hundreds of scientific articles and selected the most interesting theories, concepts and scientific research from my point of view.

I then combined them with my own experience gained over many years of experience design.

And now you hold in your hands the result of that work: the 100 Essential Principles of Design—or 100 Things I Think You Need to Know About People.

How does a person see

Vision is the main channel of perception. Half of the brain's resources are used to process and interpret visual information. What our eyes perceive is only part of the overall process. The images entering the brain are modified and interpreted. We can rightfully say that the brain “sees.”

1. What we see is different from the data entering the brain.

There is a well-established belief that while walking or, for example, sightseeing, our eyes transmit information to the brain, which processes it and presents a realistic picture of what surrounds us. But our eyes do not work like a camera that objectively captures the world. In fact, they act in conjunction with the brain, which “interprets” the visible world in a certain way. The brain continuously interprets everything you see. Look, for example, at Fig. 1.1.

Rice. 1.1. You see triangles, but in reality there are none

What do your eyes “tell” you? You can see in the background a black outline of a triangle with a white inverted triangle superimposed on top. But this is not at all what is actually present in the picture, is it? In reality there are only lines and partially filled circles. Your brain "creates" an inverted white triangle out of empty space because that's what you expect to see. This illusion is called the Kanizsa triangle, named after the Italian physiologist Gaetano Kanizsa, who demonstrated this effect in 1955. Now look at fig. 1.2, which creates a similar illusion of a rectangle.

Rice. 1.2. Example of a Kanizsa rectangle

Our brain uses stereotypes to quickly process information about the world around us. Every second it receives millions of sensory signals and tries to understand the meaning of each of them. Based on practical considerations and based on previous experience, the brain interprets visual signals. This method usually works smoothly, but sometimes errors occur.

Using different shapes and colors can influence what people see (or think they see). Figure 1.3 shows how color helps shift attention from one message to another.

Rice. 1.3. Color and shapes can affect what people see

If you want to see something in the dark, don't look directly at it

The eye contains 7 million cones (retinal cells), which provide visual perception of the entire palette of colors during the day, and 125 million rods (retinal cells), providing twilight and night vision. Cones are found in the fovea (central field of vision), and rods are evenly distributed on the retina. So if you want to see something in low light, don't look directly at it.

Optical illusions - the cause of errors

Optical illusions are an example of how the brain interprets what the eyes see. For example, in Fig. 1.4 the left line appears longer than the right, although they are actually the same. This effect is named after Franz Muller-Lyer, who discovered it in 1889.

Rice. 1.4. These lines are actually the same length

The picture we see is flat, not three-dimensional

Light rays enter the eye through the cornea and lens. The lens (which is a lens) focuses the image on the retina. The retina always produces a two-dimensional image, even if the observed object is three-dimensional. This image is sent to the visual cortex, where pattern recognition occurs, for example: “Oh, I know what this is - this is a door.” It is in the cerebral cortex that a two-dimensional image is converted into a three-dimensional one.

The visual cortex of the brain collects all information together

According to John Medina (2009), light rays pass through the pupil, lens and vitreous body, hitting the retina precisely and forming clear images of objects on it. Light-sensitive cells in the eye convert light into electrical signals and send these signals in separate tracks to particularly sensitive nerve endings. Some tracks contain information about shadows, others contain information about movement, etc. Twelve of these tracks are then sent to the visual cortex. Different areas of the cortex react to this information and process it. For example, one region responds only to lines at an angle of 40°, another to color, a third to movement, and a fourth to boundaries. Ultimately, all this data fits into two tracks: one determines movement (is the object moving?), and the other determines location (how is the object located in relation to me?).

conclusions

Perhaps people are not noticing something on your web page that you have put so much care and effort into putting on it in hopes of surprising the world? Human perception depends on the level of training, knowledge, degree of familiarity with the material one is looking at, and the person's mental models.

Your assumptions about what people see on a web page may not match what they actually see.

You can convince people to see things a certain way.

2. Peripheral vision is used more than central vision to comprehend the essence of what is seen.

We have two types of vision: central and peripheral. Central vision is used to discern details. Peripheral vision covers the rest of the visible field—the areas we can see but don't look at directly. Peripheral vision allows you to see things from angles that your eyes are not accustomed to, and new research from Kansas State University shows that it plays a more important role in understanding the world around us than previously thought. It turns out that we receive information about the world around us from our peripheral vision.

Why is image flickering so annoying?

Human peripheral vision, regardless of our desire, records movement. For example, if you are reading text and there is animation on the screen or a constant change in brightness and color around the edges of the screen, you will not be able to ignore it. If you need to focus on the text, such tricks from web designers can be quite annoying. This is peripheral vision working! This is why advertisers use brightness and color changes in ads located at the edges of web pages. It's annoying, but attention-grabbing.

Adam Larson and Lester Loschky (2009) showed viewers ordinary pictures, such as photographs of a kitchen or living room. In some images the outer part was cut out, while in others the central part was cut out. The pictures were shown for a very short time and through a special gray filter so that they were difficult to see (see Fig. 2.1–2.2). The study participants were then asked to tell what they saw.

100 main principles of design. How to keep your attention Susan Weinshenk

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Title: 100 main principles of design. How to keep your attention

About the book “100 Basic Principles of Design. How to Stay Attention" Susan Weinshenk

Design is not just a project for an interior, corporate identity or website. This is a whole process that includes not only the competent selection of colors, sizes and shapes of elements, but also taking into account human psychology. Have you noticed that one advertisement attracts your attention, while another, even posted on billboards, you don’t even notice?

The book “100 main principles of design. How to Keep Attention" will tell you how to keep consumers' attention on your advertising. This will allow you to increase sales or website traffic.

A person examines what interests him according to a certain pattern - in the form of a zigzag, he looks at a website or a page in a magazine. This is enough to understand the full meaning of what is written and depicted. If you stick to this simple rule, you'll be able to put your most important information where it's sure to be noticed.

Among other things, the book “100 Basic Principles of Design. How to Keep Attention" Susan Weinshenk will talk about how to get consumers to do what you want, how to focus their attention on the most important information, how to use a variety of colors, and how to choose the size and style of font so that they really work.

Susan Weinshenk is a Doctor of Psychology. She worked on modern research into human behavior, analyzed the data and then created a book that contains all the secrets of the psychology of modern man.

People today are somewhat different from those they were several decades ago. We have all learned to surf the web, that is, to quickly browse pages on the Internet, without reading all the information, but only noticing something important for ourselves. That is why designers need to take into account the sequence in which a person views the page, so that in these places they can place company contact information or useful information about products.

Susan Weinschenk's book 100 Essential Principles of Design. How to Maintain Attention" will be useful to everyone involved in design projects. Thanks to useful information, which you will learn from this publication, you will be able to create designs that are not only attractive in appearance, but also more effective, thoughtful from the point of view of human psychology.

Moreover, you can apply the knowledge gained from this book not only in design, but in a wider area. There is more psychology here, how one thinks and acts. modern man, so you can become more sociable, understand your interlocutors and guess their desires.

On our website about books you can download the site for free without registration or read online book“100 main principles of design. How to Maintain Attention" by Susan Weinshenk in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers there is a separate section with useful tips and recommendations, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “100 Basic Principles of Design. How to Stay Attention" Susan Weinshenk

Incentive signals on the computer screen When designing an application or website, think about the incentive signals that objects on the screen will send. For example, have you ever wondered what makes people click a button? The shadow of the button is the signal that clearly indicates that the button can be pressed and that pressing is the method that makes the button work.

Use shadows to highlight an object when it is selected or active.
Avoid inappropriate incentive signals.
Modify hover signals if you plan to use web apps on multi-touch devices.

Give your text meaningful headings. This is very important for further perception of the text.
Always keep your target audience in mind. If the text is intended for a wide range of readers, use simple words.

There is no difference in readability between serif and sans serif fonts.
Unusual and overly decorative font can interfere with pattern recognition and reduce reading speed.
If people have difficulty reading type, they tend to transfer this feeling to the text as a whole and may decide that the subject matter in the text is difficult to understand.

Use sequential disclosure. Provide the right information at the right time.
You are faced with a choice: a mouse click or mental effort? Select mouse click.

Before you use consistent discovery, make sure you know what and when most people want to find on your site.

Some say that this is because color blind people are not confused by color spots, others - because they perceive images, shape and texture more subtly. Be that as it may, for some colorblind people camouflage is not a camouflage, which cannot be said about those who have full-color vision.

Perhaps people are not noticing something on your web page that you have put so much care and effort into putting on it in hopes of surprising the world? Human perception depends on the level of training, knowledge, degree of familiarity with the material one is looking at, and the person's mental models.

Here's what grabs your attention the most:
anything that moves (such as video or animation);
eyes that look straight at us;
images that contain food, sex or danger;
stories;
loud noises (which will be covered in principle 48).

A new book from Susan Weinshenk called will be of interest to all those who are involved in graphic design and try in every possible way to attract the viewer's attention to the necessary details in their work.

In fact, the title of this book was not translated very well (or not very accurately). The original title of the book is “100 Things a Designer Needs to Know About People,” but this small problem with the title does not in any way affect the excellent content of this book.

The book examines almost all aspects of human perception: from visual to sensory - what exactly motivates a person to make certain decisions.

The book contains many illustrative examples and studies about how people perceive the world around them, what they pay attention to first and what they prefer not to notice. Problem the right direction viewer attention in any area of ​​design is very important, but most of all this factor is important in the design of interfaces and good infographics. With interfaces, almost everything is already clear: in a good interface, a person should not have a single question about where to click to get exactly what he wants.

But in infographics, the visual perception factor is slightly changed, because if we consider a static infographic (picture), then the user has no choice where to click or how to do something. All the viewer can do is perceive the information given to him. And if he sees something incomprehensible to him, then an explanation of this incomprehensible should be located in close proximity to the object being commented on. Thus, you cannot force the reader to rush around the entire picture in search of a comment, because While he is looking for this comment, he may completely forget what was unclear...

Grand total
The book is very informative and useful for absolutely everyone, even those who are just thinking about becoming a graphic designer in the field of interfaces or infographics. In any of these areas, it is extremely important to correctly manipulate the viewer’s attention, not to force his attention, but only to push him to correctly read the information.

A huge thank you to my entire great team at Peachpit, especially my editor Jeff Riley, with whom I exchanged daily emails. Thanks to Michael Nolan for his assistance in writing this book. Thanks to Guthrie Weinschenk for the photos, Maisie Weinschenk for the great ideas, and Peter Weinschenk for his support and patience. And thanks to all those who read my blog, come to my presentations, and generally listen to me when I talk about psychology. You express valuable ideas, opinions, and that is why I continue to write about psychology and design.

Whether you're creating a website, medical equipment, or any other product, your target audience is made up of people who deserve good design.

And it is your direct responsibility to know your target audience well.

How do people think? How do they make decisions? What makes a person click a button or buy something? How to get people to do what you want?

You will learn about all this from this book. You'll learn how to grab people's attention, what mistakes they make and why, and much more that will help make your design better.

And you can actually improve the design - because I've already done most of the hard work for you.

I belong to that strange category of people who love to delve into research, rummage through a huge amount of materials. So I read, and sometimes re-read it dozens of books and hundreds of scientific articles and selected the most interesting theories, concepts and scientific research from my point of view.

I then combined them with my own experience gained over many years of experience design.

And now you hold in your hands the result of that work: the 100 Essential Principles of Design—or 100 Things I Think You Need to Know About People.

Vision is the main channel of perception. Half of the brain's resources are used to process and interpret visual information. What our eyes perceive is only part of the overall process. The images entering the brain are modified and interpreted. We can rightfully say that the brain “sees.”

There is a well-established belief that while walking or, for example, sightseeing, our eyes transmit information to the brain, which processes it and presents a realistic picture of what surrounds us. But our eyes do not work like a camera that objectively captures the world. In fact, they act in conjunction with the brain, which “interprets” the visible world in a certain way. The brain continuously interprets everything you see. Look, for example, at Fig. 1.1.

Rice. 1.1. You see triangles, but in reality there are none

What do your eyes “tell” you? You can see in the background a black outline of a triangle with a white inverted triangle superimposed on top. But this is not at all what is actually present in the picture, is it? In reality there are only lines and partially filled circles. Your brain "creates" an inverted white triangle out of empty space because that's what you expect to see. This illusion is called the Kanizsa triangle, named after the Italian physiologist Gaetano Kanizsa, who demonstrated this effect in 1955. Now look at fig. 1.2, which creates a similar illusion of a rectangle.

Rice. 1.2. Example of a Kanizsa rectangle

The brain uses stereotypes

Our brain uses stereotypes to quickly process information about the world around us. Every second it receives millions of sensory signals and tries to understand the meaning of each of them. Based on practical considerations and based on previous experience, the brain interprets visual signals. This method usually works smoothly, but sometimes errors occur.

Using different shapes and colors can influence what people see (or think they see). Figure 1.3 shows how color helps shift attention from one message to another.

Rice. 1.3. Color and shapes can affect what people see

If you want to see something in the dark, don't look directly at it

The eye contains 7 million cones (retinal cells), which provide visual perception of the entire palette of colors during the day, and 125 million rods (retinal cells), providing twilight and night vision. Cones are found in the fovea (central field of vision), and rods are evenly distributed on the retina. So if you want to see something in low light, don't look directly at it.

Optical illusions - the cause of errors

Optical illusions are an example of how the brain interprets what the eyes see. For example, in Fig. 1.4 the left line appears longer than the right, although they are actually the same. This effect is named after Franz Muller-Lyer, who discovered it in 1889.

Rice. 1.4. These lines are actually the same length

The picture we see is flat, not three-dimensional

Light rays enter the eye through the cornea and lens. The lens (which is a lens) focuses the image on the retina. The retina always produces a two-dimensional image, even if the observed object is three-dimensional. This image is sent to the visual cortex, where pattern recognition occurs, for example: “Oh, I know what this is - this is a door.” It is in the cerebral cortex that a two-dimensional image is converted into a three-dimensional one.

The visual cortex of the brain collects all information together

According to John Medina (2009), light rays pass through the pupil, lens and vitreous body, hitting the retina precisely and forming clear images of objects on it. Light-sensitive cells in the eye convert light into electrical signals and send these signals in separate tracks to particularly sensitive nerve endings. Some tracks contain information about shadows, others contain information about movement, etc. Twelve of these tracks are then sent to the visual cortex. Different areas of the cortex react to this information and process it. For example, one region responds only to lines at an angle of 40°, another to color, a third to movement, and a fourth to boundaries. Ultimately, all this data fits into two tracks: one determines movement (is the object moving?), and the other determines location (how is the object located in relation to me?).

Perhaps people are not noticing something on your web page that you have put so much care and effort into putting on it in hopes of surprising the world? Human perception depends on the level of training, knowledge, degree of familiarity with the material one is looking at, and the person's mental models.