Gestalt and Design: Past Experience
This article looks at the gestalt law of past experience (also referred to as familiarity and meaningfulness.
Law of Past Experiences
The perception of visual elements is affected by someone’s past experiences.
Most would say the image above depicts a house rather than a square, rectangle, and triangle. This is an instance of the brain perceiving a picture based on familiarity rather than seeing random shapes.
Unlike the other gestalt principles, the past experiences principle is highly subjective and based on the individual since no people have different experiences.
For someone who speaks the English language, it is obvious that images A, B and C all say the word ‘Colorful’. For someone who is unfamiliar with the English alphabet, image A may appear to be several connected lines. In image B, rather than seeing each letter individually, the word is read as a whole. Similarly in C, although it appears to be three different groupings and the ‘l’ is not attached to the ‘o’ it is still read as ‘colorful’.
A common design solution that helps to organize and categorize information are tabs as seen above. It is obvious to the user that when each tab is clicked, its related content appears on the screen. This is modeled after the tabs in filing folders and phonebooks which function the same way.
Colors are often associated with different moods and will often affect the way something is perceived. The color red alone can have several different meanings such as romance and passion. However, when paired with the color green, most people think of a stop sign. Red represents stop or danger whereas green means go. The image above makes use of this relationship as hitting the green button will accept the call whereas the red button will reject it.
The red-green association is also often seen in text input validation, as seen above. When the text box is green, the input is accepted whereas a red text box indicates an error.
On just about every e-commerce store, an item will display at minimum a picture of the item, its name, and price. Sometimes they also have a call to action, as seen in image A. If someone were to come across either image A or B, they would perceive both as groups as they follow the same standardized pattern.
Sources:
- https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/gestalt-psychology-and-web-design-the-ultimate-guide
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/design-principles-visual-perception-and-the-principles-of-gestalt/
- https://jordanwlee.com/journal/design-psychology-gestalt-principles/
- https://bestwebdesign.co.za/design-principles-gestalt-psychology/
Check out the other articles in the Gestalt and Design series
