After spending a week reviewing the portfolios of design candidates who replied to a job posting, I learned three things:

1. Arrogance rarely helps, despite what Shirky says.
2. Great design is not as pervasive as I had thought. 
3. It takes me about 5 seconds to decide whether a design is any good.

The latter discoveries got me thinking. What makes good design so damn good? Why do I feel fireworks exploding in my brain when I see something that just “works”? And why do I make up my mind so quickly? Granted, some of this has much to do with my own personality, experience and biases, but there’s got to be something universal about the way we process visual information, right? I mean, it’s pretty common for the team here to agree on whether a design is “good” even if it isn’t “right” for a certain client. On a basic level, we tend to like certain things universally, (even when we don’t always admit it).

Sure enough, there’s a whole area in psychology focused on understanding the manipulation of visual attention. The most relevant approach to deciphering how this works for graphic design lies within feature integration theory. FIT posits that two different kinds of attention are responsible for enabling us to understand the visual world: feature search and conjunction search.

Feature search is a subconscious process of noting sensory information like color, orientation and intensity to identify the target you are searching for. For instance, in the example below, an O is found quickly among Xs. Or, a red object is found quickly among black objects. Physiological evidence suggests we have special receptors that respond to different visual features.  

Conjunction search entails the conscious process of identifying and combining the sensory detail to identify a target—combining two different features like color and orientation. Conjuction search is much slower than feature search as it requires conscious attention. In this example, a try searching for the orange square.

As sources of rich visual information, websites present our brains with a number of visual features that it must make sense of before we consciously interact with it. FIT tells us that our brains immediately recognize specific key visual features like color, orientation, and intensity without us realizing it. That. That right there is why solid design is so important. And presents one reason why I am able to determine when a designer is worth his or her salt.

Quality design has the power to direct the subconscious eye toward the information that is of greatest value to the client. Unfortunately, some design does a great job at muddling that pathway. And that is precisely why the best interactive designers can justify their hefty rates. 

Here are three tactics to keep in mind as you jump into designing your next interactive experience: 

1. Intensity. Our eyes are trained to pick up the nuanced differences in a color’s brightness. Use gradients in backgrounds to channel attention. 
2. Color. We are predisposed to react to different colors in expected ways. For instance, it’s easy for us to pick out a bright yellow in a sea of blue features. Use color to attract attention to specific points of interest. Make sure you are drawing attention to what you are intending to highlight. For more info on color theory, check this out.
3. Orientation. Our brains are very good at picking out the one item that’s upside down, backward, somehow uniquely different. If you need to draw attention to something in particular, think about altering their shape or positioning so it stands out from a group.

Go ahead. Try these out. If you manage to manipulate user attention within the precious first few seconds of a site visit, the chances of a conversion will increase exponentially and the ROI speaks for itself.