Results Interpretation

What is visual perception?

Visual perception is the process of understanding visual sensory information. Our brains impose an order on groups of images we perceive in order to understand them better. They also make assumptions from incomplete data, based on previous experience.

Why is visual perception important to design?

If your design fails to order information effectively, the user’s brain imposes an order of its own, different from the one the marketer intended. This means key elements are being buried amongst insignificant information.
  • It is essential to display the right information in the right order.
  • This prevents your message from being misinterpreted.

What is visual memory?

Our brain preserves our visual perceptions as mental images to access them later. But the more images our eyes are exposed to at any one time, the poorer the quality of the visual memory.

Why is visual memory important to design?

  • So many elements are competing for the user’s attention that important elements are being ignored.
  • This means key information such as the value proposition will not remain in the user’s visual memory.
  • When designing your webpages, it is important not to include too many elements.
  • The user will not remember your key message if it is lost amongst a lot of elements.

What is perceptual blindness?

This is when the human eye fails to perceive something that is in plain sight, either because the brain has no previous experience of the unseen object, or because attention is being focused elsewhere.

Why is perceptual blindness important to page design?

  • Users are focusing all their attention on the images.
  • It makes them blind to the key offers of at the page.
  • When designing your webpages, it is important that the user is not asked to focus on anything other than the core message. This could lead to important information being missed.

What is the attention reservoir?

One of the first major psychologists, William James, said that attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” We can only attend to a certain number of things at once. And even then our attention span is limited.

Why is the attention reservoir important to page design?

  • Many page elements are competing for the user’s attention.
  • Key information is being overlooked because the page fails to prioritise the elements for the user.
  • When designing your webpages, it is important to prioritize your message for the user. This will ensure the user digests all the important features before their attention runs out.