Most online users expect user-friendly designs across all of their platforms when interacting with your brand. However, many businesses struggle to meet these expectations, which leads to poor user experiences. Disregarding users’ expectations during your UX design process not only leads to frustrated users, but can also cause the loss of potential customers, result in users abandoning your Web site or app, and tarnish your brand reputation. The stakes are high, and these consequences are real.
Given the high cost of alienating potential customers with confusing user interfaces, leveraging the use of Gestalt principles of human perception is crucial. These principles are not just theoretical concepts but practical tools that can empower UX designers to create easy-to-use designs that meet your audience’s psychological needs. Gestalt principles can explain how people categorize similar elements, identify patterns, and comprehend sophisticated images when viewing user interfaces and other objects.
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By applying Gestalt principles to organize content and elements in your UX designs, you can ensure that they are both eye-catching and easy for users to comprehend. This article discusses Gestalt principles and demonstrates how they can be the key to creating engaging, effective user experiences. By understanding and applying Gestalt design principles, you can engage your audience and create better designs that users can easily understand.
Foundations of Gestalt Psychology
Understanding the foundations of Gestalt psychology is essential for you to implement Gestalt design principles effectively in your UX design solutions. Let’s explore its historical context, core concepts, and relevance to modern UX design.
Historical Context
Gestalt psychology, which Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer developed in the 20th century, examines how humans interpret sensory information on the basis of recognizable patterns and structures. According to Köhler, our interpretation of the components of a design requires our analyzing components holistically rather than individually.
By developing a unified view of human perception and behavior, Gestalt psychology paved the way for Gestalt principles such as similarity and proximity to help humans achieve order in the world. (You’ll learn about these principles later in this article.) According to Gestalt principles, people comprehend the objects around them by concentrating on them as a whole rather than focusing on their components.
Core Concepts
The first core concept, perceptual organization, argues that we can understand people’s perception of objects better through perceptual grouping. Perceptual grouping combines the existing relationships of an object’s parts into a coherent whole. For the human brain to perceive complete wholes, perceptual grouping follows Gestalt laws in logically organizing visual information.
In the Phi phenomenon, a key concept of Gestalt, humans observe apparent motion when two nearby stationary images are presented at a relatively high frequency. This optical illusion tricks the human brain into believing that the fixed images are moving. Based on this observation, Wertheimer concluded that people perceive things by seeing the whole picture.
In UX design, you can apply the Phi phenomenon to create engaging user interfaces that guide users through a series of steps or actions, making the experience more dynamic and interactive.
Relevance to Modern UX Design
Understanding Gestalt psychology is crucial to creating easy-to-use, aesthetically appealing user interfaces that meet users’ perceptual needs. According to research by emplifi, 49% of consumers abandon brands because of a poor user experience. Ignoring the need to create designs that meet your audience’s expectations can cost you customers.
By applying Gestalt principles in design, you can create easy-to-use, engaging digital platforms that enhance user acquisition and retention by doing the following:
strengthening relationships between data points
establishing a visual hierarchy
grouping related elements
improving navigation
Designers can use such Gestalt principles as figure-ground, similarity, and proximity to achieve easy-to-understand user interfaces, establish users’ understanding of a platform, and deliver seamless user journeys.
Key Gestalt Principles in UX Design
Gestalt theory comprises several design principles. Let’s consider some of the key principles that you should prioritize using in your UX design solutions.
1. Proximity
The principle of proximity states that the strongest spatial relationships occur when design elements are close to each other. UX designers can use proximity to enhance understanding and navigation by grouping related functions. By applying proximity to form fields and buttons, you can enable users to easily comprehend the relationships between these different elements, making it easier for them to make decisions. For example, as shown in Figure 1, UserPilot replaces a field’s label with placeholder text within the field so users can perceive these as a single design element.
Figure 1—Proximity of form elements
2. Similarity
According to the principle of similarity, the human brain perceives objects with similar elements as belonging to a single grouping or pattern. In Gestalt psychology, similarity is essential to the way humans perceive and organize visual information. In UX design, using similarity to categorize items based on their shared attributes creates visual consistency and hierarchy, enabling you to achieve a cohesive visual experience. This lets users interpret patterns more efficiently, reducing their mental workload and improving their ability to perceive things correctly.
Use consistent icons, buttons, and tables in your designs to demonstrate grouping. For example, the Web site for a WWII tour agency in Normandy, which is shown in Figure 2, uses the principle of similarity effectively. Each tour-package card has a consistent layout with a photo, title, description, and buttons in the same style and position.
Figure 2—Consistent cards demonstrate similarity
This uniform design helps users quickly compare different tours and understand their options. The consistent fonts and colors tie the design together, reducing confusion and creating a smooth browsing experience. For example, when users see the Get a Quote button, they instantly know its function across all tour packages, making navigation straightforward and efficient.
3. Closure
The closure principle is in operation when the human mind automatically fills in missing parts of objects—even in cases where a designer has intentionally omitted some essential parts. The principle of closure empowers users to recognize familiar objects using pre-existing mental patterns.
By building user interfaces with elements that make users complete visual elements, you can trigger their inner curiosity and motivate them to engage with your designs. For instance, using interactive elements such as pop-up windows or animated transitions can create a sense of closure, encouraging users to explore further. When creating logos, adding some mystery—which HP did in creating their logo, shown in Figure 3—can encourage the user to engage more deeply with the brand.
Figure 3—The HP logo uses the principle of closure
Other ways of achieving closure in design include simplifying icons and animating progress indicators that show a page is loading.
4. Continuity
The Gestalt principle of continuity lets people perceive the connected elements in a series as one continuous unit. In UX design, continuity can help you create a visual path using visual cues such as lines and shapes, creating a sense of flow that guides a visitor’s eye in a specific direction. For example, using a consistent color scheme or visual style throughout a Web site can create a sense of continuity, helping users more easily navigate and understand the site’s structure.
You can use slideshows, horizontal sliders, or carousels, and progress bars to create progressive layouts and reduce users’ cognitive load. As shown in Figure 4, Mention executes this strategy well by using a carousel to enable users to scroll through their testimonial section.
Figure 4—A carousel on Mention demonstrates continuity
5. Figure-Ground
According to the figure-ground principle, humans categorize objects as either in the foreground or in the background. In UX design, you can use the figure-ground principle to dictate the content and elements that users perceive as being in the foreground or in the background.
By applying the figure-ground principle, you can emphasize modal windows, call-to-action buttons, and navigation bars, helping users concentrate on the essential aspects of your designs and potentially boosting conversion rates. For example, by using large, white text, Apple Music strengthens the foreground over the background in Figure 5.
Figure 5—Apple Music
Visual Perception and UX Design
Visual perception and UX design go hand in hand. Let’s consider how the two interconnect to offer good user experiences.
Human Perception Mechanisms
Top-down processing, a critical human-perception mechanism, involves perceiving things based on our prior experiences and knowledge. Users rely on pre-existing concepts to internalize new information, recognize patterns, and make wise decisions.
In bottom-up processing, users’ perceptual experience is based on the sensory stimuli they process. Using sensory data, people can make sense of the world, absorb energy from their environment, and convert it through sensation. Perception then results in the correct interpretation of these stimuli.
Visual Elements In Design
The use of whitespace is crucial in distinguishing and grouping the elements in a design, showing their relationship to improve visual perception. Using whitespace effectively in designs helps create balance and visual hierarchy, enhancing a platform’s usability and improving the user experience by
drawing users’ focus to critical elements on pages
improving the readability of text
organizing content effectively
However, managing negative space is also crucial for balance and emphasis. Optimize the use of whitespace when dividing or grouping elements so viewers can process the information they see more logically and more easily make decisions.
Perceptual Experiences in the User Experience
We can better explain perceptual experience through multistability, the ability to use certain technologies for a wide variety of purposes (the multi), but not all purposes (the stability). Multistability describes the human desire to seek certainty when we’re presented with a stationary, ambiguous visual stimulus. When we’re viewing ambiguous objects, our brain prioritizes one interpretation over another to reduce ambiguity. Thus, from a design perspective, you can make users focus on your desired perception by strengthening it and weakening the alternative perceptions.
Applying Gestalt Principles to UX Design
Now let’s consider some ways in which understanding Gestalt principles can help us achieve good UX design.
Creating Effective Visual Hierarchies
For digital platforms to succeed, their user experience design should have a compelling visual hierarchy that informs, impresses, and persuades users. The use of Gestalt principles enables a clear visual hierarchy for easy navigation through a user interface. For instance, by strategically structuring elements in line with Gestalt principles, you can ensure that users first notice the essential elements of your designs. Thus, you can direct users’ attention to specific focal points, guiding them to take desired actions.
Enhancing Usability Through Perceptual Organization
Applying fundamental Gestalt principles is critical to creating well-organized, highly functional designs that foster smooth, seamless user interactions. Within the context of UX design, Gestalt principles enable you to place user-interface elements on pages strategically and craft easy-to-use, engaging user experiences that gain competitive advantage.
According to Forbes, research shows that 50% of consumers assess Web-site design to decide whether to engage with and recommend a business. Implementing Gestalt principles lets you structure design elements in ways that naturally please the eye and meet your audiences’ psychological needs.
Improving User-Interface Design
Integrating Gestalt principles into user-interface design helps you group information effectively, simplify visual elements, and organize user interfaces to enhance users’ efficiency.
One application of Gestalt principles in data visualization is design color selection. Colors play an essential role in highlighting, categorizing, and differentiating visual elements. By thoughtfully selecting the colors for your designs, you can enhance their visual appeal and engage your audience. By applying other Gestalt principles—such as using closure in creating icons and symbols—you can achieve simplicity on a platform.
Conclusion
Comprehending and applying Gestalt principles in UX design is crucial in creating easy-to-use, visually appealing, user-friendly interfaces. By using these principles in your designs, you can create effective visual hierarchies, improve navigation, and enhance a Web site’s usability.
As a UX designer, find ways of incorporating the Gestalt principles that I’ve discussed in this article into your design solutions. Doing so can ensure that you satisfy users’ perceptual needs and create successful digital platforms.
Digital PR at uSERP and Content Management at Wordable
Mexico City, Mexico
Guillaume is a performance-driven marketing professional who is skilled in creating marketing plans and leading successful teams in product launches, promotions, and development. He is well-versed in search-engine optimization (SEO), content creation, social-media audience engagement, and brand management. Guillaume is currently focused on handling content management at Wordable and digital PR at uSERP. He holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in Digital Marketing, Communications, and Event Production. Outside of work, he enjoys his expat life in sunny Mexico, reading books, wandering, and catching the latest shows on TV. Read More
