How people see
After feedback week for my portfolio website, I felt I needed to revisit basic design principles. This would help me understand what people will see when viewing my portfolio site as I am hoping to find employers with my portfolio.
To do this I read specifically the ‘How people see’ section of Weinschenk’s book, 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People.
Susan Weinshchenk starts off this chapter by describing how the human brain creates shortcuts in order to quickly analyse our surroundings. We receive so much sensory information in a short amount of time the brain relies on previous experience and patterns to draw conclusions on what it sees. Most of the time this is done with ease but sometimes the shortcuts show themselves in optical illusions. Weinschenk refers to Kanizsa’s triangle and rectangle as examples.
Weinschenk also discusses how shapes and colour can affect how people see things. Two words put beside each other may not have any connections but if they are put inside a rectangle, our brains group these words together and create a connection.
She then states what we as designers should take away from this information;
“What people think people will see in your webpage might not be the case” She implies that a person’s own background and knowledge of technology along with their experience and knowledge of other websites decides how they will view your website.
She also discusses how we can persuade people to see things a certain way depending on how we present the content and if we use shape and colour to group content together. Animated and blinking images on a website can be annoying and distracting for users as the movement draws the eye but they are not taking in any important information.
Weinschenk goes on to discuss a research study by Larson and Loschkey in 2009 where they showed people common and familiar scenes in photographs. However a group of these photographs would show the centre of the photo obscured and the other group would show the outer edges obscured. When these photos were shown quickly to the group of people they discovered that people could not recognise those familiar scenes when the centre parts were obscured. From this they determined that central vision is the most critical.
Continuing on with recognition in the brain, Weinschenk discusses object recognition. She says that we recognise basic shapes and use these to identify the objects around us. Research suggests that there are 24 different basic shapes shapes we identify. Weinschenk then explains how this information is useful to us as designers saything that, we should use patterns as much as possible. Meaning we should use grouping and white space to our advantage and geometric shapes for our icons to make them as recognisable as possible.