What is common with successful and converting websites? Businesses with successful websites provide a smooth user experience for their visitors. They make it clear what they offer to their visitors and what steps visitors need to take if they are interested.
In this series of posts, I will be sharing one design principle every week to help you design a website that will motivate your clients or customers to purchase. Today’s design principle is White Space.
WHITE SPACE is simply the blank area
- Around
- inside
- or between
the elements of a design (Source: UX Engineer).
Just to clarify, white space doesn’t refer to just white areas in a website – the area can be in any colour, pattern or texture. It is simply a blank area.
Let me show you exactly what I mean:
In this diagram, the white space is the area in purple. Like I said before, it is the area around elements such as the text, images or shapes.
Why is white space important?
- Improves comprehension
- Having the right amount of white space enables website visitors to read content comfortably – the easier it is read, the longer they will read
- In fact, a recent study concluded that the “use of white space between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increased comprehension by almost 20%.”
- Let’s see an example (see below): which one is more comfortable to read? The second one right?
- Increases engagement rate
- “…the average attention span of an internet user is 6 seconds, which is even less than what a goldfish has (7–8 seconds)“
- Hence we need to make sure we make the process simple for users to focus on our call to action elements.
- Think of the google search page, the search bar is in the middle surrounded by white space. Although it is not obvious but the white space helps the search bar to become more prominent. This allows the user to shift their attention or focus on the actual search bar.
- Provides a breathing room for users:
- White space is like a breathing room. Without a good amount of white space, all elements are jammed together and it can be very hard for your user to read. If you look at my presentation slides, I used a good amount of white space to make sure you guys read my content without hassle.
Okay, now we learnt the theory behind white space. What do you think? Did you learn anything new? Comment below and stay tuned for our next design principle which will be contrast.
Wish you all a pleasant day!
Reference List: UX Engineer and Prototyp
DONITA WM 