Incorporating visual distinction to make your website stand out

Website designing has become a crucial element in everyday businesses. As entrepreneurs and new-age business leaders start investing in their own organisations, websites form the building blocks to a digital world of E-commerce.

When we talk about websites, we talk about how through evolution, we have developed an incredibly sophisticated system of visual and cognitive processing for websites. The main element of visual appeal is that it can awaken memories and emotions like trust, comfort, hope, or self-confidence. These appeals also impact how we encode information in our memory and therefore our ability to recall or recognize items and events.

When it comes to digital interfaces, it was found that contrasting elements have the tendency to draw our attention faster. A primary challenge for a designer is to manage what users will focus on in an interface while supporting them in achieving their goals.

Von Restorff Effect

When a designer says to a client, “Let’s do something different and creative, something that is out of the box”. The client may be immediately faced with questions like, “Will it work? Why to deviate from the usual ones, the ones that are not common in the market?” It might just sound like a leap in the dark to the client. But guess what, the von Restorff effect is evidence that doing something different from the established norm, does work in aiding memorability.

Simply put, the von Restorff effect elucidates that in a group of similar elements, the one that looks different from the rest is most likely to be remembered. This is also called the isolation effect: the distinctive feature of the element isolates it from others. According to neuroscientists, our mind and brain have a tendency to remember things that are different. They search for visual discrepancies and look out to break habits.

The von Restorff effect has been widely used in almost every website and service, some of which make use of it more effectively than others. The requirement to make every single element and content visually distinct is fundamental in design.

When this principle is used sparingly and strategically, the design not only helps draw the user’s attention but also directs them to the most valuable information. Some of the common examples are:

• Pricing Plan chart

In some cases, the design draws the user’s attention to the most popular offering (most likely the profitable one too), by emphasising on it. The designer can focus on a certain element by isolating the offering by increasing its size and changing its colour or make use of the colour red which is known to evoke feelings of alertness and attention.

• Call to Action

Ever observed why Buy now and Sign up buttons stand out the most on any webpage? The button is designed to draw the users’ attention and perform the click action. The designers want the users to differentiate between the simple buttons and call to action buttons, and make it as obvious and unobstructed as possible. By simply changing the font, colour, and shape of the button, designers attempt to steer the user’s attention.

• Incoming Notifications

The von Restroff effect can also be observed when alerting users to incoming notifications. From the example stated above, the users can clearly distinguish which app requires their immediate attention and action.

• News Websites

This effect is also commonly used in news websites to place emphasis on featured content to make specific content stand out against other headlines and ads.

Selective Attention

Humans live in an overstimulating world full of distractions. Every day, at any given moment, humans are subject to a plethora of sensory information with multiple signals competing for their attention. Our ability to focus on things around us is limited in terms of capacity and duration, hence we only focus on relevant information. This phenomenon is known as selective attention.

Selective Attention refers to the ability to select from many objects and focus on one particular object or stimuli in the design or web page and filtering out other distractions. Attention being a limited resource, this type of filtering allows us to overlook unimportant elements and focus on what really matters. The user may tend to stay focused only on the part of the webpage that seems relevant and meets their goal.

Tunnel Vision

When the brain adapts to selectively attend to the web page content due to cognitive overload, the human visual system acquires a tunnel vision, that is, the user focuses on a particular element and disregards the others. To prevent tunnel vision, we can position related items close together. This makes the design more accessible and also helps the low-vision users who magnify the screen to perceive the information when it is in proximity.

Banner Blindness

It refers to the tendency of users to ignore elements that they perceive to be advertisements on a webpage. When we choose to selectively attend to content, we may omit the content that is not helpful and defeats our goal, for example, digital ads.

Users may search for elements that would help them achieve their goal – especially design patterns such as search bars, navigation, links, or buttons; and would instinctively look for these items in common locations.

Therefore, it is vital to visually differentiate between content and an ad to minimise the possibility of it being inadvertently perceived as an ad by not placing them in the same section. This could be done by carefully choosing colours, background, and type of the content carefully. The designers must also be mindful of not mixing content and ads.

Website designing is an art but designers should employ restraint when placing visual elements on the webpage. Moreover, taking into consideration the positioning of related items, carefully choosing the colour, background and the type of content are other considerations that designers must follow. These short but effective strategies can always be harnessed by organisations to make their content more audience-specific. Today, a good website can make or break a deal. It is up to us how we want to use it to our advantage.

Gaurav Kumar, CEO & Co-Founder, Myraah