Now a lot of things that we've talked about in this module is all to do with how do you direct a user's 1
attention. 2
And we've always come full circle to the first point that we made about user interface design. 3
It's about tailoring the experience for your users by guiding their attention towards different things. 4
I really wish that instead of calling user interface designers designers that they could be called attention 5
wizards because that's essentially your job. 6
You're using various tools at your disposal to manipulate-- to manipulate and guide a user's attention. 7
You're essentially playing around with this currency that is user attention. And we know that when we 8
comes to typefaces there's quite a few ways how you can direct that attention. 9
For example you can make the text larger or smaller, you can make it bolder brighter in color or you 10
can make it more muted. 11
You can use a typeface with a heavy weighting versus something that is thin or light or you can capitalize 12
and lowercase some of the words as well as making something italic or increasing the distance between 13
each of the letters to make the overall size of the words take up more space. 14
So when you have a project such as designing the user interface of a app or website essentially you're 15
using those techniques to direct attention. 16
So for example, if the first thing that I want people to look at when they land on my web page is the 17
word material design 18
then I will make that super bold, super black, use a really heavyweight typeface and use a font that's 19
really blocky, all the ways in which I can make sure that the first thing that their eyes will be drawn 20
to is the words material design. 21
Now depending on the use case, maybe the first thing that you want your user to see will be different. 22
Maybe it's you know how good your product is 23
or maybe it's, you know, how many places your product has been featured et cetera et cetera. 24
But you can use these six ways to manipulate your typeface and direct attention very easily. 25
Now the footer is not about attention grabbing. 26
You know when you look AirBnB and it says, you know, "Made with love in San Francisco" or something like 27
where "Make something you love." 28
You know these are meant to be subtle whispers like when you're watching a movie and you pick up on 29
a subtle hint. 30
And similarly you can use these techniques to reduce the amount of attention they command to weave in 31
subtlety and delight. 32
And this is a really good example to look at. Sometimes you know these techniques can be used unintuitively. 33
For example the title here that these people bluhomes.com wanted to convey is that they can provide a 34
better client experience and they obviously want to highlight the word better to differentiate themselves 35
from you know other companies. 36
But because the title is already the first thing that they want users to look at, they've made it blocky 37
they've made it capitalized, 38
they made the font size really big. 39
If they made that word even bolder even heavier even blacker, it still wouldn't stand out all that much. 40
But actually in fact, by downgrading the amount of attention and commands, by making it italic, by making 41
it lower case, by making the overall size of that word slightly smaller, it actually provides contrast 42
from the rest of the sentence and instead becomes the focus of the attention. 43
So the message really is just play around with some of these techniques that you've learned and see 44
how you can architect a user journey using various ways of commanding attention. And I have included 45
and I've included a link to a super hilarious infographic from the guys that play to web design who 46
have translated some of the crazy stuff that they hear from clients for their design works such as "Make 47
it look more luxurious..." into what they actually mean 48
for example wider thinner fonts in caps. And 49
I think it's really funny how they've managed to capture some of these common things you hear from 50
clients into actual things that you can do with your designs in terms of commanding attention 51
and in terms of some of the things that we've mentioned and in terms of some of the techniques that 52
we've mentioned. So have a look at that for a good laugh as well as an understanding of how difficult 53
a job designers and developers have in translating something that is locked within a client's head into 54
real life and into their hands. 55
And so this is another case for why you want to learn at least a little bit about design and development 56
in order to understand the work of designers and developers, in order to better express what you want 57
and for the end result to better mimic what you had in mind.