Techniques for Drawing User Attention to Key Design Elements

The primary aim of UX design is to create a design that caters to the users' requirements. To help users comprehend and discover the crucial areas of your design, emphasis plays a vital role. Emphasizing a specific object or element in a design implies it attracts the user's attention, enabling their eyes to focus on a specific area of an app screen or webpage. Various techniques can be utilized to incorporate emphasis in your designs.

Size?

Implementing changes to the size of elements in your designs is an easy way to provide emphasis for users by drawing their attention to larger objects while simultaneously conveying that one object is more important than another.?

A great example of size is the visible text within an app's design. Using a larger size for the title of the page, like "watermelon" in the image below, helps to orient the user. That page name should be bigger or bolder than the rest of the text on that page to show the importance of that specific text.?

Contrast

Contrast is the creation of opposing visual elements to convey emphasis or comparison. Contrast is a great way to draw emphasis to elements in a design that are different or important. In the image below, the checkout cart and "order" buttons are colored bright red and purple which contrasts with the otherwise white and gray app.

You can also provide contrast by changing the look of text. There are a few ways to add contrast to text, like bolding, adding color, underlining, italicizing, and highlighting important information that the user should take note of.?

Texture

Texture is the elements within an object that add depth or a pattern to an object. Texture can make an object stand out from other objects within a design and should be used sparingly to draw the user’s gaze.

One way to create emphasis using texture is to place lines or shapes over an image that is used repeatedly. Adding texture provides a break in the pattern of the same image and it gives users something to interact with. For example, if you are designing a page to show users information about your brand, like in the image of an app below, adding texture is a great way to add emphasis and draw the user’s eyes to a part of the design.?In the graphic, the "80% of our shoppers" is represented by the polka dotted section of the pie chart. In other words, the most important section of the chart is emphasized with texture.

Emphasis in the real world

Check out this example of design from the Google's About page, which demonstrates the effective use of emphasis. Google’s mission statement uses color contrast to grab the user’s attention and emphasize the main points of the company's mission at a glance.

The design of the page helps the user identify two important things simultaneously:

• Understand the importance of Google’s mission statement with black, easy-to-read font on a white background that doesn’t distract the reader from their interaction with the page.
• Color contrast highlights Google’s brand pillars, the most important areas within the mission statement.

The primary aim of UX design is to create a design that caters to the users' requirements. To help users comprehend and discover the crucial areas of your design, emphasis plays a vital role. Emphasizing a specific object or element in a design implies it attracts the user's attention, enabling their eyes to focus on a specific area of an app screen or webpage. Various techniques can be utilized to incorporate emphasis in your designs.