Where do people look first on a computer screen? Where do they look next? It depends partially on what they are doing and expecting. Left to right? — If people read in languages that move from left to right, then they tend to look at the screen from left to right. If they read from…
Category Archives: visual design
100 Things You Should Know About People: #92 — There Is A Brain Area Dedicated To Perceiving Faces
You are walking down a busy street in a large city and suddenly you see the face of one of your close relatives. Even if you were not expecting to see this person, and even if there are dozens, or even hundreds of people in your visual field, you will immediately recognize this as your…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #51 — You React To Colors Based On Your Culture
Many years ago I worked with a client who had created a color map of the different business regions for their business, showing the total revenue for the quarter for each region. Yellow was for the Eastern part of the US, green for the Central, etc. They had used red for the western states. The…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #28 — Things that are close together seem to belong together
Do you want a quick and easy way to make any web page easier to use and more intuitive? If you want people to realize that two things “belong” together, then put them near each other (close proximity), and put other things a little further away. Sounds simple, right? Many usability and user experience principles…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #27 — We go below the “fold”
For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about “the fold”. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything…
Book Review of Visual Language for Designers
Here is a Quick Review of a new book, Visual Language for Designers by Connie Malamed. First the video and then the text summary: When I first looked at this book I said “Wow!”. It’s a large book, hardcover, with thick paper and beautiful illustrations, as it should be, since it’s a book on visual…
10 Best Posts of 2009
It’s that time of year — so here is my list of the 10 best posts from my blog in 2009. I chose the 10 that I believe have had the greatest impact/most thought provoking/most interest from my readers. #1: Dopamine Makes You Addicted to Seeking Information — I thought this was an interesting post…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #20 — Your Attention Is Riveted By Pictures Of People
Second only to movement (animation, video), pictures of a human face capture attention in any medium, including websites. Pictures of a human face not only capture attention, but keep the attention on that part of the screen even when the picture goes away. We start young — With some creative experiments it has been proven…
7 Steps to Successful Web Site Redesign
Jacek Utko is a newspaper designer. He has designed/redesigned many newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe and won world awards. He believes strongly in “giving power to the designers” and that designers should embed their personal vision into the work they do, even at the expense of being a team player. Utko’s words and work…
100 Things You Should Know About People: #14 — Reading Text Online Is Not Fun
It’s the holiday season right now in the USA which means that people are talking about what they want as a gift. I would like a Kindle or one of the new Barnes and Noble competitors to the Kindle. Since we are being frugal in our household this year I don’t think I’m going to…