DESIGNING FOR SCANNING, NOT READING
Faced with the fact that your users are whizzing by, there are some important
things you can do to make sure they see and understand as much of what they
need to know—and of what you want them to know—as possible:
- Take advantage of conventions
- Create effective visual hierarchies
- Break pages up into clearly defined areas
- Make it obvious what’s clickable
- Eliminate distractions
- Format content to support scanning
Conventions are your friends
- Follow the existing conventions (widely used & standardized design patterns)
Ex. Stop Signs
Same everywhere
- Logo is expected to be at the top left.
- For example, almost all sites that sell products use
the metaphor of a shopping cart and a very similar series of forms for
specifying things like your method of payment, your shipping address,
and so on.
- Many elements have a standardized appearance, like
the icon that tells you it’s a link to a video, the search icon, and the
social networking sharing options.
- If you’re not going to use an existing Web convention, you need to be sure
that what you’re replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory
that there’s no learning curve—so it’s as good as the convention, or (b) adds
so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve.
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💡 Innovate when you know you have a better idea, but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.
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The rule of thumb is that you can—and should—be as creative and
innovative as you want, and add as much aesthetic appeal as you can, as long
as you make sure it’s still usable.
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💡 CLARITY TRUMPS CONSISTENCY
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Create Effective Visual Hierachies