What designers need to know about perception
A short introduction
Psychology in design is a hot topic amongst designers nowadays. It’s a great thing to see that we’ve integrated techniques and concepts and that we’re making progress towards a better integration of the domain with our own. There is an increasing number of psychology-related articles that help designers expand their horizons and I hope this one will add to that list too.
If you’re interested in psychology as much as I am, you probably know by now that psychologists have a popular saying:
Everything psychological is biological
You might wonder why I want to bring this up.
Designers are communicators. Amongst many other things, designers bring ideas to life usually using visual means. And seeing is what humans do best, that’s why a design mockup is so efficient when presenting it to the team. It communicates a large amount of information in a short amount of time.
Did you know that humans have the best vision out of all the animals (except birds of prey)? Yup, we do.
Knowing how perception works it’s a valuable bit of information that all designers should be aware of. In my opinion, this will consolidate the reasoning behind some of the most important design decisions and it will bring everything full circle.
Let’s start with light
Light is a wonderful thing, but scientists describe it as an electromagnetic radiation. Visible light, the one that’s on the visible spectrum (which is a small fraction of the whole electromagnetic spectrum) is what gives us the sense of sight. For the purpose of this article, I will refer to light as a wave because it will help us understand things with ease without going into details.
What’s important for designers to know is that light is characterized by three things: Frequency, Amplitude and Wave Length.
Frequency gives it the hue and Amplitude gives it the brightness.
Remember it, it comes in handy!
For example, short wavelengths with high frequency give the light a blue color. Can you guess what long wavelengths with a low-frequency result?
Here is an experiment you can play with to learn more:
You promised us psychology but you want to talk biology but in the end, you actually talk about physics? What is this?
Hold on, I’m getting there! Maybe…
Moving to the eyes
Eyes are a wonderful thing too. It is rumoured that designers have the most accurate and advanced type of eyes amongst any other type of person, wink wink. They are the receivers of light and the input organs of sight.
Light bounces on objects and then into our eyes, goes through the Cornea, the Pupil and through the Lens which projects an image onto the retina.
This image is not actually a real image, it’s more of an interpretation of our senses of what we see. We have millions and millions of specialized cells named rods and cones, each one getting a piece of that light came into the eye.
The rods cells are extremely sensitive to light, it is proved that they can be triggered even by a single photon. At a really low light, the sight is based on the signal from the cones cells. This is why colour is hard to see at a low light. The more you know!
The human eye is exceptional. The average person is able to distinguish around a million different hues. Another rumor says that designers can distinguish around 10 million different color hues. Allegedly.
Now the brain
All the information captured by the eyes travels as a neuro impulse through the optic nerve, continuing to the visual area of the thalamus, being processed in the end by the visual cortex.
The visual cortex is located on the back side of the brain, called the occipital lobe and it’s specialized in visual processing. The right part of the lobe gets the info from the left eye and vice versa.
What we should remember here is that this part of the brain, the visual cortex, has specialized cells called feature detectors. These neurons or groups of neurons are responsible for identifying shapes, movement or angles or edges.
It was researched and discovered that we actually trace every angle and line of the objects we see with our eyes. When you are contemplating a new design, take into consideration how much effort your users do when they interact with your design. Keep everything simple and easy to trace with your eyes so that the visual cortex can process everything fast!
One important part of the visual cortex is responsible for face recognition.
We actually have a construct in the brain for that! Face recognition is important in design. We often hear how important are pictures of smiling handsome and symmetrical people in our mockups.
Faces attract our attention and depending on their expression, it influences our mood which is proven to influence our decision-making capabilities. Now we know how much that ties to the human nature!
Motion detection is something that’s really important for designers to know about too. The visual cortex takes care of this as well having specialized areas in its structure!
In today’s age, we have a lot of great tools and ways to create transitions, animate elements and play with movement. If you didn’t know, peripheral vision is the one that’s responsible for motion detection at a sensorial level so that’s why moving ads on the sides of your screen are so annoying! They bank exactly on this concept!
The best part about all this is that the visual cortex does everything in parallel in the process called Parallel Processing. It makes sense of color, depth, form, and motion all at once!
Fun fact: the amount of information that the brain processes in an unconscious state is estimated to be roughly 11 million pieces of information/sec. You wouldn’t probably guess that the conscious state falls behind at only 40 pieces per second. Keep your designs nice and clean!
Takeaway
Design is a complex domain that borrows knowledge from many others and it’s not something did at random. Psychology, biology and even physics should be the ones consolidating our design decisions whenever we deal with difficult problems.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and I would really appreciate your support. Thank you for reading!
