Want your designs to be attractive so people are more likely to engage with your content? This step-by-step guide will help you to get a clear idea of the ways to improve your designs. Attention Insight analysis will check your design’s quality through attention heatmaps, percentage of attention, focus map, and clarity score. Upload, analyze, make changes, and improve your design by applying design principles.
STEP #1 Upload an image for analysis
Choose Analysis Type: Desktop, Marketing Material, Mobile, Posters, Packaging or Shelves.
- Upload images that you want to test or enter the webpage URL.
- Once you upload your image(s), press Analyze All.
Now we can identify which elements in the design need to get the most viewer’s attention. Let’s say, we think that the title and the CTA button Shop Now are the most important elements in the design, and thus, we want them to be the most eye-catching parts of the design, as well as to receive a significant percentage of attention. Let’s try and increase the percentage for both, the title and the CTA button.
We believe that the minimum desired attention for the CTA button would be 3%, while 4% would be excellent.
STEP #2 Analyse results: Attention Heatmap and Focus Map
In the blink of an eye, you will get a visual representation of how the viewer’s attention is distributed in the design. With Attention Heatmap and Focus Map, you can check whether the most important elements in your design attract enough viewer’s attention.
- Attention Heatmaps show which objects the user will notice first. Warm colors (red and yellow) represent which areas attract the most attention.
- Focus Map shows which parts of your design are noticed or missed within the first 3-5 seconds.
- Clarity score describes how clear your design is: whether it is overloaded with elements, conflicting colors, or it is clean and clear. A score of 95 indicates maximally clean design.
STEP #3 Draw AoIs
To make sure the most important objects received notable attention, test it by drawing Areas of Interest on desired objects.
- Areas of interest (AOI): a platform calculates the percentage of attention that objects get. It lets you evaluate the performance of different objects you want to draw user attention to.
The algorithm automatically recognizes CTA buttons. In addition, to test other objects (logo, title, etc.), you need to draw AOI by dragging a rectangle. Once you draw a rectangle, press Calculate Attention. Also, you can name it. The percentage of attention that a particular object received is calculated instantly.
Here we can see that the CTA button Shop Now received 2.7%, which is not a satisfactory percentage for our goal – let’s see if we can increase the figure by 1 or more percent.
By the way, you can analyze the results online or download the analysis: in the top right corner click the download button.
You will be able to reach all your created studies anytime, anywhere – just login into your account.
STEP #4 Make changes to improve your design
After you identify visual attention errors, make small changes to your design. The beauty is that it doesn’t have to be a big change. Sometimes it’s as easy as increasing the size of the most important text, changing the background picture, or the color of the website elements.
As we chose the title and the button as the most important elements in our design (and we acknowledged that they are not standing out enough), let’s make some changes to see if the design improves.
Firstly, we will remove the frames around the text and the images to increase the white space. Then we will move the description text (after making it shorter), as well as the CTA button, below the title. After that, we will drag all the elements that are placed in the center, toward the left side of the page. We will increase the size of both, the heading (the title) and the subheading (the text). Also, we will make the background image bigger. These changes will help us to make a more balanced hierarchy of the elements and should increase the attention of the most important element by making them stand out.
Our goal is to create a better design that would serve the initial aim.
You can apply design principles, such as these:
To make changes in your design, hire a designer, use Adobe software, a website builder such as Wix or Squarespace (if you are using a template), or a graphic design platform such as Canva.
STEP #5 A/B Testing: Test Improved Design
- Make some changes to your design.
- Go back and click Create New Analysis.
- Add the new version of the design.
- Draw rectangles on the same objects. CTAs are already marked.
Let’s do the same analysis with the edited version.
STEP #6 Compare
- To compare the designs, click the button with two arrows facing each other at the top right of the page, next to the download button.
Create a new comparison by entering a name and clicking Select analyses to compare.
- Select both analyses and click Compare.
- Compare the performance of two different designs.
- If you want to add additional areas of interest, click Add Element.
In the example above, the heatmap suggests that, after making changes, one of the essential elements in the design – the title, gets the attention that is distributed more evenly and is more central than in the previous version of the design. The percentage of attention tells us that, rising from 42.4% to 46%, the attention of the title increased by 3.6%.
Also, it is crucial to note that in the initial design version, it is hard to pinpoint exactly how much attention the title got due to the overlap of the title and the image of the kids. We can see from the heatmap that most of the attention in the title area was drawn by the face of the kid and not the title itself. You should avoid such overlap by all means. It makes it much harder to read text or to see the face. Not to mention that the text won’t get as much attention as it could. You can see that in the second design, it is the text in the title that actually gets the attention and even more of it.
When we look at the heatmap distribution on the CTA button Shop Now, after changing its placement, color, and size, we see that it also receives more viewer’s attention. On top of that, the percentage of attention increased by 2.2% (rising from 2.7% to 4.9%). The clarity score of the design increased from 61% to 74%. We have reached our initial goal of drawing more viewer’s attention to the title and CTA button.
To sum up, the Attention Insight platform lets you identify visual attention errors, get insights into users’ attention shifts and make data-based improvements to your visual content. Within minutes you can see the design through the eyes of users to optimize the user experience and improve the conversions.
For more information and inspiration check out Attention Insight Youtube channel.
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