Ever watched a Bollywood movie dance? There are a lot of background dancers wearing the same clothes, however, the protagonists stand out by wearing totally different colours. This aligns with Von Restorff Effect, a psychological principle coined by Hedwig von Restorff.
Von Restorff Effect states that if an item differs from its surroundings, it is more likely to be noticed and remembered. This can be due to the following reasons:
- A user’s attention is easily captured when a contrasting item is present in a set of homogeneous items. This is because our brain is wired to identify unique stimuli.
- Our brain has a limited cognitive capacity at a specific time period. Hence, when a distinctive item is present, the user’s attention is directed towards it.
- Distinctive elements evoke a feeling of surprise or delight, resulting in greater memorability.
Following are three ways in which the Von Restorff Effect can be utilized to achieve user and business goals.
#1 Call to Action or Buttons
- Chat interfaces like Telegram use floating action buttons to start a new chat. The button stays in the same place while the user scrolls through the app and has a distinctive shape when compared to the existing chats on the screen.
- The profile selection screen on OTT platforms like Hotstar provides a focus to add a new profile by not using any graphic on the plus icon, while the existing profiles have graphic designs.
- E-commerce platforms like Flipkart provide a focussed ‘Buy Now’ button which is in colour, totally different from the elements on the product page.
#2 Animations
- The carousel banners on the home page of Flipkart scroll automatically. This provides an emphasis on the real estate which is additional to the top placement on the home screen.
- When a user applies an offer on Zomato, a delightful animation is presented to emphasize the savings the user gets on the platform.
- When a user adds a product to the cart on Amazon, a micro-animation is played at the cart icon to emphasize an increment in the count of items in the cart.
#3 Text Formatting
- Products used the tags like ‘New’ to emphasize the new services being launched.
- The emails which are unread have bold sender names and subject text. This provides an emphasis on which emails require the user’s attention.
- E-commerce platforms like Flipkart emphasize special deals in a certain category by using textual badges on the category thumbnails.
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Resources to learn how to improve usability using psychology principles
- Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug (Paperback)
- Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen Anderson (Kindle | Paperback)
- Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski (Kindle | Audiobook | Paperback)