Book: 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk Ph.D.
This entire section was dedicated to how people see and a lot of the research and science behind it. The insights that stuck out to me were: proximity, affordances, and color-blindness.
Proximity:
People group things together naturally, they look for patterns in everyday things. The main rule of thumb: use space to dictate if items belong together or not. More space means they are separate, less space means they are relevant.
Affordances:
How do the objects (digital or physical) communicate with you? Does it interact well with you or does it not make sense? Like good design, you won’t really notice it until you come across a bad design. Make sure the visual cues you are using are the correct ones.
Color-blindness:
It’s very rare for someone to be completely color-blind. It’s more common is for red-green blindness, however, there is other specific color blindness. So in regards to design and adjusting for color-blindness users, you need to either use a redundant coding scheme or consider colors that work for everyone. Some resources to help you with this: Vischeck and Color Blind Filter
If you read this section, what stood out to you?
- KJ
Originally published at http://blklightningcreative.com on April 6, 2022.
