Unit 1 - How People See

In this chapter the author Susan Weinschenk talks about how we see. She talks about the brain as being a powerful thing that gets a different message than what your eyes sometimes show you. your brain is constantly interpreting everything. your brain sees what it wants to see and creates shortcuts to quickly make sense of a situation; a good example of these are optical illusions, or particular illusions that the author used in the book called Kanizsa Triangle.

Optical illusions- the brains misinterpretation of what the eyes see these lines are all the same size but they dont look like it. 

   

                  

                        

 Kaniza Triangle

Your mind uses rules of thumb from past experiences, and because of this you can use certain things like shapes and colors to influence people to see things in a certain way depending on how you present them.

Peripheral vision is another thing the brain uses, it is just as, if not, more important than the central vision in getting the gist of what we are seeing. Our central vision is good for focusing in on something but our peripheral is good when seeing the whole picture. We get information on what type of scenes we are looking at through our Peripheral. Peripheral vision is also very sensitive to movement and thats why a lot of advertisers have blinking lights on their adds this can also be distracting for a viewer if you are trying to have them focus on a certain area. Peripheral vision is used to scan a web page and decide what its about, so although the central vision is important for your website don't ignore  the viewers peripheral. 

People also identify things they see as patterns its how we read (through recognition) and when we group things. Because we as humans are looking for patterns subconsciously it is important to design in patterns because that is what they will already be expecting, anything else will start to feel uncomfortable. Simplify images can also make things more recognizable and making them 2d instead of 3d  will avoid slowing down the recognition and comprehension process.

There is a special part of the brain that recognizes shapes and objects, and there is another area of the brain that recognizes faces. An example that the book used was, when you are walking through a crowd of people and see someone that you know. You automatically recognize them even though you were not expecting to see them this is usually followed by an emotion. Using faces is a very strong technique when you see someone looking at something in a magazine your eye tends to follow what they are looking at, its a way of showing direction when navigating ones eye. The lady below is looking in the direction of the burger so your eye automatically goes there before it goes to the apple.

The next thing the author talks about is how people scan screens based on past experience and expectations. Where the person looks first and then next depends on what they are looking for and where they are coming from. If you are from the US it tends to be that you navigate from left to right, the same direction in which you read, for china it would be different and so on. For this reason it is important to put the most important things you want people to focus on in top third of the screen or in the middle. Also avoid putting anything important at the edges because people tend to not look their, and the last thing is to avoid patterns where people have to bounce back and fourth to look at the page stick to the left to right or right to left direction depending on your normal reading pattern.

Another way we see are in the form of cues that tell us what to do with an object. These cues are called affordances. They are things like doorknob that you know to turn or handles on a cup that let you know how to grab it and pick it up. To design affordances  wether it is real or on the web you need to make sure its easily perceivable, you can figure it out, and interpret what the object is and what they can do with it. By giving people cues about what they can do with an object it makes it more likely that they will take that action, you can do this by adding shading.

Another thing the author talks about is how people believe that things that are close together belong together so if you want something to connect to something else put it close in proximity. you don't need to separate items by lines  or boxes if you experiment with the proximity. Put more space between items that don't go together and less space between those that do.

There have been studies showing that red and blue when put together are hard on the eyes. So it is a rule of thumb to avoid blue and red, or green and red near each other on a page or screen. Adding to the conversation of color, the author talked about how nine percent of men and one half percent of women are color blind so when you design you need to know what your design may look like to different people. If you want to know what your website  looks to those that may be color blind you can go to www.vischeck.com or colorfilter.wickline.org. avoid red green in yellow for emphasizing a meaning. the last thing the author talks about is the meaning of colors in different cultures. Certain colors evoke certain meanings so choose colors carefully example red means negative green means positive in terms of money (just one example). This is important to know what different colors mean in different cultures because they change there meaning. To learn more about colors in other countries go to informationlsbeautiful.net this can avoid unintended color associations for that culture.