Support Your Designs with Statistics

Clients often think that print and Web design is about “making things pretty.” You and I know it goes far beyond, but it can be difficult to convince clients that your concept will communicate more successfully than the one some relative dreamed up last night at dinner.
Now you have an ally in your fight for good design: the 3M Visual Attention Service. Yeah, 3M, the company that makes Scotch tape and Post-It Notes. Turns out that 3M has conducted eye-tracking studies for decades. Now the results from that research, which shows what’s most likely to catch our attention when looking at a scene, have become a computer algorithm that powers the online Visual Attention Service (VAS).
To use the VAS, you upload an ad, say, or a page from a Web site. The service then calculates where viewer’s eyes are most likely to go to first. If the VAS results support your design concept, you can then show those results to your client. However, if the most important elements don’t rank high enough, you can decide if you want to use the VAS results to revise the layout.


Each analysis costs 1 credit, and credit prices range from $4.50 to $20, depending on how many you buy and whether you pay as you go or subscribe. Unless you’re a big company with deep pockets, you don’t want to run to VAS for every iteration of every layout. Anyway, VAS isn’t meant to replace your design skills and instincts. But it does add an objective opinion to what can be a subjective process.
You can upload as many as five images for free, so you might as well test the service, which officially launches tomorrow, May 12.

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