Visual hierarchy: Make 'em look, and make 'em stay

-Amber Davis, Senior Consultant, Mix Consulting

Humans are functioning in content overload. With every effort you make to market your product or service—whether a social post, an online ad campaign, or a website landing page—you are competing with thousands of shiny, noisy, attention-grabbing messages. Contrary to the popular claim that you have only eight seconds to win a consumer, science actually tells us that people have a vast capacity for sustained attention—if you hook them with a story and make them feel something.1 So how do you get your target audience user to look, and how do you get them to stay?

Employing visual hierarchy in your marketing lengthens user engagement and strengthens the impact of your messaging.

Visual hierarchy determines which elements engage a user first, and where they go from there—in what order—before you’ve lost them. Do it well and they might stay long enough to be interested. Get them to stay even longer, and you’ve increased the likelihood that they will take the call to action (CTA) that your asset leads them to. Get more users to answer the CTA, and you’ve got effective marketing.

This is as much about psychology as it is about art and design. Why is the user staying longer? Hopefully, it’s not because they are design savvy and your asset is a train wreck they can’t look away from. We want them to stay because they feel something—and emotions lead to action.

We can divide the elements of visual hierarchy into four actionable steps.

Step one: Organize your information

Know the content and rank it in order of importance based on desired outcome. Ask yourself: if your end-user is a skimmer, what’s the most important idea for them to glean? The next most important? The next? Make sure your message has a strong hypothesis—an opener your audience can’t ignore.

For example: Let’s say I run a business selling gourmet marshmallows to people who enjoy camping, and I’m creating an online ad. The most important thing that I want my target audience to know is that my marshmallows are created specifically for roasting over a campfire. I may also want them to know that many campers have tested my marshmallows and rated them the best for travel without getting sticky or losing fluffiness and flavor (marshmallow-packing pain points), and I want to offer an enticing CTA.

I’ll come up with a bold opener—a hypothesis they can’t ignore—and then rank my points of information that support that hypothesis in order of declining importance from there.

I might end up with something like this:

Step two: Use intentional alignment

If we are not prepared for the way users read, then large chunks of our message will go unread.

In 2019, Nielsen Norman Group replicated their landmark 2006 study of eye-tracking patterns which showed that English-speakers consistently consume content in the shape of a letter F, or sometimes E.2 The 2019 study findings demonstrated the same conclusion. To take advantage of a reality that seems here to stay, align your important information on the left of your design space and make use of short, bolded headlines, bullet points and other such attention-grabbers to break up paragraph blocks.

Heat maps of eye-tracking studies. 2 You can see that the most focus falls on the upper left of the page. Other studies back this phenomenon. Place your most important content there.

A scanning pattern in the shape of the letter Z is also common among left-to-right, top-to-bottom English readers. It’s a little more applicable to web design than print media, but since so much of our media is consumed online, it doesn’t hurt to keep this phenomenon in mind.

Alignment communicates order by connecting elements spatially, through columns, grids, and subtle shapes.

Back to my marshmallow business.

Now I take my information hierarchy and sketch out a loose plan for intentional alignment in an F or E pattern. Like this:

Step three: Employ basic design principles

Here’s a brief overview of key principles.

Size

Larger elements command attention. They should hold the most important information. Correspondingly, the importance of the content should decrease as the size of its typeface or container decreases. Size is the easiest way to guide a reader from point A to point B, and in some cases it’s all you need.

Color and contrast

A pop of color can draw attention to an element, an abundance of color to a larger section or theme. The absence of color in an otherwise colorful layout is powerful as well. Dramatically contrasting colors create more emphasis than a palette of subtle scale. Read here for more on color and emotional impact.

Proximity

Grouping elements visually creates sub hierarchies of information. Placing related content close together cues readers to better understand ideas that are—well, related.

Repetition

Repetition is the reusing of the same or similar elements throughout the design. It unifies ideas and overall composition. This is especially important for brand recognition. Repeat some element—font, color, shape or size—throughout the asset.

White space

White space, or negative space, is either simply unoccupied space in a design asset, or the implication of an object by its absence. It draws attention to the focal point—the occupied space—by virtue of juxtaposition. It gives objects and typography room to breathe, and it gives the reader time and space to process.

The Rule of Odd Numbers

People like odd numbers of objects, content blocks, and even listed items in visual communication better than even numbers. Why? Not to get too mathematical, but it has to do with balance. Odd numbers have a fulcrum: a natural center of balance. It’s a symmetry that creates a focal point as opposed to—as in even numbers—a symmetry that divides.

The next step for Mountain Mallows, then, is to select some of these principles and build a design that serves the message.

Step four: Apply everything with purpose

You’ll notice that the final design content isn’t quite the same as the draft. Design can help you cull your messaging—in the case of Mountain Mallows, I tightened the tag line and eliminated the part about the product being available in grocery stores, since my CTA leads people to my website and that information is available there, but I’d rather they purchased through my website anyway.

They say “presentation is everything” for a reason. Where and how we convey marketing messages bears as much weight in your marketing efforts—if not more—than the message itself.

At Mix, we apply the principles here with purpose, putting ourselves in the shoes of the end user with every asset we create. Visual hierarchy serves to raise our work to a higher level and gives our stories the emotional and psychological impact of powerful design.

After all, there’s a lot of content out there to cut through. We’ve got to get them to look—and want to stay.

Visual hierarchy: Make 'em look, and make 'em stay

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