Imagine someone shows you a map of the United States demonstrating some statistical information. Some of the states are colored in bright red. Where does your gaze go? Do you look at the bright red states first because their color stands out? Or do your eyes go immediately to the state you live in, trying to determine which color it is?
One of the most important jobs of a graphic designer is to guide the eyes of your audience. But did you know there are two competing theories for how this works?
Today we’ll be exploring the visual salience and cognitive importance theories. Both of them seek to explain where our eyes go when we look at an image, and why.
Visual Salience
The visual salience theory is probably the most prevalent theory in design. This says that our eyes are drawn involuntarily to design elements such as color, shape, contrast, position, and size. These are also called preattentive attributes and it takes less than 500 milliseconds for our eyes and brain to process them.
Author of Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals, Cole Knaflic says preattentive attributes “are visual cues that ease the processing of the information. When done well, there should be no question on the part of your audience when it comes to what is important or where they should focus their attention—it is obvious.” It stands out like a red dress in a sea of black dresses.
This is a comforting theory for designers who spend a lot of time arranging these elements in a way that is both effective and attractive. And there is no doubt that our eyes are drawn to elements in design that stand out because of their size or color or placement or movement. But new research is showing that our visual salience isn’t the only thing directing our gaze.
Cognitive Importance
The other main theory about eye movement is called cognitive guidance theory. It proposes that human eyes are drawn to things that have meaning for them. Researchers from the University of British Columbia noted what when we look at images which contain people, we look primarily and instinctually at their eyes. They ask, “Why is this? It cannot be because eyes are merely the most salient area in a scene, as relative to other objects they are fairly inconspicuous.” They go on to find that we look at the eyes because we consider them to be a source of information. They hold meaning. This is a natural human response because from a very young age we learn to meet the gaze the other humans to get information.
In recent studies, John M. Henderson and Taylor R. Hayes, both of the University of California, found that meaning might be more important than visual salience. They found that things like the context and the goals of the viewer highly influence what the viewer focuses on more heavily than design elements.
Perhaps the best design takes both visual salience and cognitive importance into account. They should be seen more like two sides of coin versus opposite ends of a spectrum. After all, visual salience is more concerned with what the sender/designer wants to get across. And cognitive importance focuses on what the receiver/customer is hoping to find or learn or gain. When both sides of the coin are considered in design, the product is better is every time.
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