Design Principles 101

Suppose you look at a design, say a website. You open the webpage, and you find the images and the text not blending well. The typography is all over the place for some reason, the colors of the website are too bright for the eyes, and the animations are slow.

Infuriating, isn’t it? The user is less likely to come back to this website since it’s difficult to navigate and because they did not get the information they were looking for on time. Things like this are reasons why we should pay attention when properly designing products and services. While designers focus on how to make the website usable to people, there is another factor that they pay attention to in design.

Psychology has an important role to play in terms of design. There are several principles that designers learn with regards to human behavior when using a website. When they understand these principles, they’re able to find ways to implement this in their design resulting in more positive user experiences. Here are some design tips that can be used in the near future. 

The most common rules that designed should learn about are the Gestalt Principles. 

1. Similarity: If the user sees objects that look similar, they perceive these objects as a group. It is defined by shape, color, size, texture, and value. It gives a sense of consistency in the design.
2. Continuation: It is when the human eye follows one object to another. This occurs usually with curved lines
3. Closure: This is where the human eye can see closed objects and it works when the image is half complete since the human eye can perceive the full shape with missing parts.
4. Proximity: When objects are placed close together, the user perceives it as a group.
5. Figure/Ground: This is when users separate objects from backgrounds.
6. Color Psychology: Color has an influence on a person’s opinion of a design most of the time. Men and Women will see colors differently, so it’s important to also consider the audience for the website. Are the majority of the audience for this website male or female?
7. User Patterns: Scanning Patterns would be a useful thing to keep in mind when designing web pages. A common viewing pattern would be the “F” pattern, in which the viewer starts reading the information from the top left and then making their way to the bottom.
8. Fonts: Fonts are another thing to keep in mind. Users care more about the font size and simplicity than fonts for the purpose of aesthetic.

Here’s the takeaway: there’s more to design than just the visuals as it’s a tool of communication between a designer and the user. Making use of the various principles of human behavior helps elevate great design into something amazing.

Know thy users for they are not you.