Web Application Hierarchy

How we use the web:
The eye jumps around being areas of visual information. Do I care about this or not?

Design Considerations:

1. The organization of stuff: the structure of your information. 
   
2. Interaction: How your application behaves in response to user actions.
   
3. Presentation: How your application appears to your audience. Communicates the interaction layer. 

Presentation layer outlines relationships between content, makes organizational systems clear, helps build consistency, guides users through actions, conveying personality, having emotional impact, communicating brand message.

Visual Organization: using relations to communicate features, functions, etc...

Personality: visceral design

Quickly Communicate:

• What is this? Usefulness
  
• How do I use it? Usability
  
• Why should I care? Desirability. 

How we make sense of what we see

• recognizine similarities and differences
  
• this allows us to group information and give it meaning

Relationships

• between indviduals elements
  
• to the whole story

Several principles tell us how (why) we group visual information

• proximity
  
• similarities
  
• continuance
  
• closure 

Forming relationships

• creating relationships requires an understanindg of what mekes things different
  
• introducing variations in one or more of the categories (color, texture, shape, direction, size) creates visual contrast also created through positioning

Use visual relationships to...

• add more or less visual weight to objects
  
• difference is created by contrast between objects
  
• we care about things having more or less weight because we can use it to focus people's attention in the presentation layer

Distribution of visual weight...

• visually dominant images get notice most
  
• focal point, center of interest

visual communication is part
visual organization and part personality
visual hierarchy is a deliberate prioritization of
visual weight enabled by the manipulation of
visual relations to create
meaning for users.

What do we do with a visual hierarchy?

Communicating a central message - what is it and why is it different than everything else?

Prioritization becomes even more important when you consider how people access content. We tend to think within our own confines but people are accessing it through much broader means.


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