US Weekly, one of my great guilty pleasures, is no exception. USmagazine.com is now a significant component of my experience and ability to obtain celebrity news and gossip in this great nation. I often spend a few minutes of each day surfing the bright hyperlinked pages. I can be pulled in a direction by the mention of a particular A-lister but I have come to realize that the very design of this interface intentionally directs my eyes to motion, imagery and organizational features in prime locality.
“We have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses,” (Lotto). Sight is arguably our greatest sense; but the truth is our eyes don’t really see anything. Images are constructed in our brains based on simple signals sent from the photosensitive cells in our eyes. When I notice the flamingo pink that is part of US Weekly’s color palette, my eyes are merely detectors of light, which in turn send signals to my brain that interpret this color.
“Nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. For us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does,” (Lotto). There are two components to seeing: the eye, which is the easy part to understand, and our perception of our eyes' signals as processed by our brain, which is far more difficult (Kolbe). Adding to the mélange of stimuli, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are,” (Berger 9).
When I click on my bookmarked browser link I find myself arriving at my favorite portal for the latest in who’s who nattering. Top news is that Kate Middleton is meeting with recovering addicts this Valentine’s Day, and Jennifer Hudson hasn’t stopped crying since news of Whitney Houston’s death. As I stare at the screen my eyes are naturally drawn to hot spots within milliseconds, but why?
In my first eye spy, I notice moving graphics dancing on the screen. My eyes, like all of yours, are trained to follow shifting objects. This is intentional showboating, a promoter’s “look at me” attention seeking behavior. The eye’s retina has two kinds of cells: rods and cones. Rods can detect light, darkness and sense motion and cones detect color. Rod and cone cells are connected to the optic nerve, which carries the image from your eye to your brain (Kolbe).
“Large ganglion cells called magnocellular neurons, or M cells, are triggered into action when part of the image of a moving hand sweeps across their receptive field,” (Montgomery 1). In perceiving motion, as in determining color, the brain constructs a view of the world from pieces of information. Currently there are three moving features on the home page for USmagazine.com, the first is a center stage slideshow featuring relationships of the rich and famous or “Hot Pics.” Due to Valentine’s Day the US Weekly logo is also flashing, surrounded by pulsating hearts and cupid’s arrow.
Finally, and this is no doubt a plan of a marketer somewhere, the subscription notice for the magazine beckons my consideration as a gridded box begins with a colorful slate and than fills with informational content and imagery. All three of these examples have given my M cells a run, triggered acknowledgement, and early stages of processing. It will only take a second before I can understand the information and significance of these particular stories and their superiority to anything static on the page.
After I have deciphered the more energetic components, I find my eyes focusing on the headlining imagery, pictures of Kate Upton, Jennifer Lopez and Courtney Cox. We’ve all heard time and again that pictures speak louder than words, but we don’t dive into the science behind this phenomenon. A simple argument could be made that imagery conveys meaning far more quickly than text, but the brightness and size of these images also make a strong case for directing my sight.
“No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world …In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature,” (Berger 10). US Weekly minimizes text-allowing images to be dominant in both their print and online versions. Our brains form images based on pattern recognition. Data from our visual system are processed to create the images we perceive. Certainly dense scientific research exists to shed light on the biological and psychological processes in play, but when I look at an image of chic Reese Witherspoon my eyes are gathering data; line, pattern and color. The brain interprets this not only as an image, but a recognizable face.
I am able to navigate USmagazine.com because of a designer’s thoughtful exploration of my needs as a celebrity stalker. The wireframe is based on the golden grid rule, or the rule of thirds (Lidwell 208). Symmetry, alignment and proximity allow me to make sense of the information before me.
“Gestalt psychology attempts to understand psychological phenomena by viewing them as organized and structured wholes rather than the sum of their constituent parts,” (Soegaard). The Gestalt principles account for theories of visual perception, several of these are at work in the arrangement of material on the site. Not only was a designer conscious of good navigational functionalities but additionally the tracking of the human eye. Jakob Nielsen’s research in this area has demonstrated that users read web content in an F-shaped pattern (Nielsen).
The F-shape reading pattern refers to the viewing order; in the case the menu bars and latest news headlines have prime real estate. A designer has utilized bright color swatches that contrast with the whiteness of the remaining screen when information falls lower on the homepage or outside this zone. “Color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect,” (Lotto). The organizational features and placement on this interface allow my brain to make sense of an onslaught of data. “The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world,” (Lotto).
Since the rants of Plato, humans have come to give primacy to visual sensory experience. We’ve all heard things like “seeing is believing,” or “love at first sight,” which is certainly my experience with Ryan Gosling.
As a species, we are driven by a desire to uncover connotation, above all, we are, as Roland Barthes suggested, “Homo Significans” or meaning-makers. This fundamental human aspiration underlies the process of our visual perception; faced even by “meaningless” patterns our brain will strive to make sense of it all.
It’s not a matter of chance that my eyes are drawn to particular features on USmagazine.com. A well-intentioned designer’s objective is not only to consider how an interface will be seen, but how it will be perceived; this relies on having a fundamental understanding of the mechanics of sight and visual perception. As Beau Lotto said, “ We must investigate how people literally make sense of the world,” (Lotto). It’s not an easy task: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world… The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” (Berger 7).
Works Cited
Beau Lotto. “Optical Illusions Show How We See | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
Berger, John. "Ways of Seeing." BergerWaysSeeingchp1.pdf. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
Kolb, Helga. "Photoreceptors – Webvision." The Organization of the Retina and Visual System. The University of Utah School of Medicine, July 2011. Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. Universal Principles of Design. Beverly, MA: Rockport, 2010. Print.
Montgomery, Geoffrey. "A Hot Spot in the Brain's Motion Pathway." Howard Hughes Medical Institute | Biomedical Research & Science Education (HHMI). Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
Nielsen, Jakob. "F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content." Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders, 2000. Print.
Soegaard, Mads. "Gestalt Principles of Form Perception." Interaction-Design.org. 2010. Web. 15 Feb. 2012.
