Visual Hierarchy Element in Web Design

In web design, we have limited time and limited user’s attention and it is tough to convey our message to the visitor in that limited time meanwhile also ensuring no miscommunication happens. Visual Hierarchy enables us to guide the user on what’s more important to them as well as to us hence preventing any confusion in design.

In this article, we will discuss What Visual Hierarchy is. How to create Visual Hierarchy? and some best practices around Visual Hierarchy.

Visual Hierarchy refers to arranging the visual elements in a design to rank them and guide the user on which element is more important and deserves more attention than the others. Visual Hierarchy is essential to convey the right message to the visitors without any miscommunications. It helps in avoiding confusing designs.

Visual Hierarchy also reduces the Cognitive load on the users by directing their attention onto lesser and more important elements making the website look less confusing and preventing information from bursting on the customers. All this makes setting up a Visual Hierarchy extremely important for any designer.

Following is the list of ways in which you can create Visual Hierarchy among elements in web design:

• Color: Using Color we can make certain elements of design stand out from others, this makes these elements appear to be more important and of higher hierarchy while other elements so as important as them. It is not necessary to use certain colors to grab user’s attention, you can similar colors for visuals with low hierarchy and have a different color for showing the element that is more important. Make sure that you use bright and saturated colors to denote the more important visuals while the lesser important colors can be given relatively dull color.
• Contrast: Contrast is a visual design principle where we try and differentiate one or more elements/visuals from others by differentiating them by help of colors, fonts, typography, repetition, alignment, or anything else. The idea is to make a particular element or visual to stand out to the users. Contrast is the best way to make some elements stand out than others. We can also use type variation to create contrast. Words styled differently than the surrounding texts, like italic or underlined, will attract your attention.
• Scale: Scale is very important for showing an element to be more important than other. Your visitors are going to see bigger elements first before seeing smaller elements which is why it is another way to create Visual hierarchy. We can use scaling in text as well as visuals. Text with larger font size appears to be more important than the text in smaller size. While creating Visual Hierarchy using scale of the design elements you must make sure that you are not using more than three sizes, Only have at max three sizes – small, medium, and large, and make the most important element the biggest. Likewise, make less important elements smaller. This will help reinforcing the visual hierarchy in the design.
• Grouping and proximity: Grouping means specifically looking at proximity and common regions. For example, top-level navigation is usually grouped in a line at the top of a webpage. Without groupings, it will be harder to understand where the standard areas are and it would be difficult to identify areas that need attention and areas that doesn’t.
• Texture and Tone: Texture and Tone can also be used for drawing attention. This is not the conventional way of directing attention onto visual elements but along with using Scale to display the Visual Hierarchy, texture and tone can be used to balance that out by also bringing some importance to the elements with lower Visual Hierarchy.

• Three Flow Rule: When you have your Design Concepts and your ideas finalized in your mind you should start thinking about the Three Flow Rule. The three components of the three flow rule that you should ask yourself are:
  • Where are the viewer’s eyes initially going to land on your design?
  • Where is the likely second place the viewer’s eye will actually move to?
  • Where will the viewer’s eye finally finish up?

• Primary and Secondary Goals: When you’re designing an interface, the first thing you should do as a best practice is to to understand the goals of interface. What the interface is, and who is it used for? Have a primary and a secondary goal for your interface before starting out with Visual Hierarchy.
• Viewing Patterns: Viewing pattern is the subconscious pattern that we use to view anything. In the western countries, users mostly tend to have a Z viewing pattern where they scan a website from left to right and then from top to bottom. Take advantage of the viewing patterns of your customers to set up Visual Hierarchy.

Visual Hierarchy refers to arranging the visual elements in a design in order to rank them and guide the user on which element is more important and deserves more attention then the others. It is essential to establish visual hierarchy in our web design in order to convey our message to the visitors without any miscommunications. There are five major ways to set up Visual Hierarchy is a web design, these are – Color, Contrast, Scale, Texture and Tone and finally Grouping and proximity. Make sure to follow the points abut Visual Hierarchy that we discussed in the article when you design Visual Elements for your next website.