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In: SEO| programming| web design
13 Mar 2010Have you ever been walking a paved path through a park and come across an unpaved shortcut? The shortcut was clearly not designed by the developers of the park, but it’s clearly a route people before you have taken and it’s clearly a quicker way to get from point A to point B. Do you take the unpaved path?
The path had been made over time as more and more people chose to walk the straight line across the field as opposed to walking the paved path around it. The path was a perfect example of a desire line. Don’t fight desire lines. Learn to embrace them.
Desire lines are the unpaved paths that are developed over time by human and animal footfall. They typically represent the shortest or most easily navigated route from one point to another. Their size represents the amount of demand for taking the desired path over the designed path.
They’re the path people choose to take as opposed to the path designers want or expect them to take. It doesn’t matter how beautiful you’ve designed the landscape, if you fail to provide a convenient way to get from point A to point B people are going to carve out a shortcut.
As designers we want to control how people perceive our designs and keep people on our predefined path. We create lines for the eye to follow so they notice what we want them to notice. We direct them to the actions we want to them to take. We create navigation through our sites for how we expect people to travel our web pages.
And then along come real people who use our sites and view our pages, however they like. These people are creating desire lines through our websites. We can try our best to force them to do it our way, but they won’t. They’ll either do it their way or leave. A better approach would be to understand where the desire lines in our sites being created and adjust our designs to those desire lines.
We can apply the idea of desire lines to visual flow in your design, creation of new content, increasing traffic into your site, and how people generally interact with your website.

When people can contribute anonymously without worry of social repercussions, honest answers emerge. When aggregated, these honest answers will represent collective intelligence. We want to get at that collective intelligence so users of our systems can let us know how we can improve them and design them better.
How do we understand what our audience wants, what it desires? What can we do to determine desire lines on our site?
Much of the above is about analytics, about measuring how people are using your site. These statistics, particularly in-site search show what users want from your website, not what they say they want, but what they actually want and do.
You can try seeking direct feedback from users in the actual moment they are using your site. While feedback can be an expression of desire keeping in mind that this feedback is not truly anonymous and it’s what people say they want, which may not be what they really want.
Keep in mind that the desire of one or two individuals is not a desire line or at least not a strong desire line. It takes more than a couple of people to carve a path through a field.

Understanding desire lines is only part of the equation. Knowing what people want is one thing. Acting on that information is another. What can you do with the information you gather?
If people are actively searching for things on your site you should first determine if you have what they want somewhere on the site. If you do it likely means people can’t find it so your response should be to make that content more obvious. Is it something you can add to your main navigation? Could you find some way to feature that content better? Maybe you need to link to that content from within the pages where people are searching.
If that content doesn’t yet exist on your site, create it. People are searching for it. They expect you to have it somewhere so create it. Give people <a what they desire.
Similarly when looking through your stats discover the content people are finding and are consuming and give them more of that content. Look for themes in the content people are finding and consuming and let it shape your choices for future content.
This can be a good way to increase your search traffic. If you notice certain pages of your site are doing well pulling search traffic, you can create new and similar (though not the same) content on the same topic. It could be a sign that your site has reached a level of authority where it can compete on keywords around that topic. By adding more content around the same keyword theme you can bootstrap your traffic from long tail keywords toward keyword phrases found in the head of search.
Look at the other sites sending traffic to your site and strengthen your presence with those sources. Is one site sending you traffic month over month? Build a relationship with the people behind that site. Does one article consistently send traffic back to your site? Help promote that article. Get more people to enter that path. Make that path back to you site wider.
Did you create a series of posts expecting that people would read through them linearly? Are they? Or do people stop reading after one of the posts in the series? Do they skip one of the posts in the series? Learn from how people are clicking between your pages to restructure these click paths to be more in line with the paths people actually take.
Through heat maps and eye tracking you can understand where people are looking and clicking on your page. Is this where you want them to look and click? Can you modify your designs to nudge them back to the path you want them to take? Could you instead move more important elements on the path they are already taking?

In Finland, planners are known to visit their parks immediately after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are not visible. People naturally choose desire lines, which are then clearly indicated by their footprints and can be used to guide the routing of paths.
— Wikipedia
Microsoft began the practice of requesting you to submit a crash report when something goes wrong while you’re using their operating system. You may or may not send those reports, but if enough people do, it helps Microsoft understand how you were actually using their system, especially at the moment where you encountered a problem. Others have followed by requesting you submit a crash report when having a problem with their software.
Amazon lets users review products and reviews of products and tracks what you purchase in order to recommend similar items.
Twitter is a company that has grown almost entirely out of desire lines. Twitter began as a system to post 140 character messages with little other structure. It has allowed it’s users to shape how the service works. It was users who created @replies, retweets, and hashtags. Twitter has also grown through its API which has let developers create new features based on what Twitter users are asking for. Most of how you use Twitter today was shaped by the desire lines of your fellow users and not by the people behind Twitter.
Only after the desire lines form does Twitter pave those paths.
Designers do their best to anticipate what an audience wants and how it will interact with a design. We often try to control how people will interact with our designs. Desire lines show how people are actually using your design. They show how people want your website to behave.
It’s in your best interest to understand the desire lines of your audience. Learn how they currently use your site and what they wish your site could be. Collect information and let strong desire lines emerge.
Don’t be a slave to desire lines. Part of your job as a designer is to shape the desire of your audience.
If desire lines are narrow think twice before making changes. When desire lines are wide think about what you can do to accommodate them. When a significant percentage of your audience is expressing a desire for something it’s usually best to give them what they want.
Desire lines are an ultimate expression of human desire or natural purpose. An optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all. Simply plant grass seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths needs to be.
Commercial Success by Looking for Desire Lines (PDF)
In: SEO| programming| web design
13 Mar 2010Images of people draw our attention. However, different images with different people will affect us differently.
How do we perceive images of people? How do they affect us and how do they affect the way your design is perceived? When choosing an image to convey a particular message are there certain facial features you should look for? Is there an ideal way to crop the image so it communicates best?
Three principles of design that involve how we perceive images of people are attractiveness bias, face-ism ratio, and baby-face bias.
Each offers clues into what your viewers will subconsciously think when seeing images of people in your designs. An understanding of these three principles will help you choose people images that work in harmony with your design.

Attractive people are generally perceived more positively than unattractive people. We have a tendency to view attractive people as more intelligent, competent, moral, and sociable than unattractive people. Attractive people receive more attention from the opposite sex, more affection from mothers, more leniency from judges and juries.
Attractive people are even preferred in hiring and will make more money, all other things being equal.
I hope you’ll agree that attractive people are not automatically smarter, more competent, or more moral than unattractive people, nor do they deserve a better fate in court or a larger bank account solely on the basis of their looks.
However we seem predisposed to favor attractive people, likely due to reproductive instinct.
My guess is most of the above is already known to you in some degree and that were you to pick between two images of people to place in a design you would naturally choose the person more attractive to you.

The term and idea behind face-ism originated during research into gender bias in the media. It had been observed that images of men focused mainly on their faces, while images of women more often featured their body in addition to their face. This was observed across cultures and was thought to reflect gender-stereotypical beliefs in regards to the characteristics of men and women.
In experiments with college students, students were asked to draw images of men and women and told they were only being evaluated on their drawing skills. Both male and female college students had a tendency to draw detailed faces for men and included more of the body when drawing women. Women’s faces were drawn with less facial details.
The face-ism ratio is expressed as:
the distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin divided by the distance from the top of the head to the lowest part of the body shown.
An image showing only a face would have a face-ism ratio of 1.00 and an image showing no face would have a face-ism ration of 0.00.
What’s most interesting is what we think of images with different face-ism rations. A high ratio focuses attention on intellectual and personality attributes, while a low ratio focuses attention on physical and sensual attributes.
People who view images with a high face-ism ratio tend to rate the people in those images as being more intelligent, dominant, and ambitious than the images of the same people with a low face-ism ratio.
Each of the links below will take you to a PDF that explores face-ism in politics.

Babies typically have round features, big eyes and a small nose, a high forehead, a short chin, and lighter skin and hair color than adults.
We tend to see people with baby-face features as being more naive and helpless, innocent and honest, than people with mature facial features. Hardly a stretch when you consider the previous characteristics are typical of babies. However, we also see those same characteristics in adults with baby-face features.
Baby-face people might have difficulty being taken seriously when expertise, authority, or confrontation are called for.
On the opposite side babies with weaker baby-face features are treated less positively and are even rated less likable than those with strong baby-face features. Premature babies often have a low degree of baby-face features and sadly the rate of child abuse is greater in premature babies than full term babies.
People with baby-face features are more likely to be found innocent when a crime involves an intentional act, though they are more likely to be found guilty when the crime involves an act of negligence. They tend to receive harsher sentences when pleading guilty, probably because of the greater contrast between expectations of innocence and the conclusion of guilt.
Baby-face bias exists across all age groups and cultures. It’s seen across many mammalian species. Baby-face characteristics and bias are even seen in objects.

The implications of attractiveness bias should be obvious. Because attractive people are viewed more positively, you’re better off using images of attractive people than unattractive people. The images will be viewed more positively and consequently your design, website, and business will be too.
When it comes to face-ism ratio you want to choose or crop images based on the message you’re trying to communicate.
When it’s important to convey more thoughtful associations you want to use a high face-ism image. Crop the image so it shows as little of the body as necessary.
When your design calls for associations with physicality and sensuality you want a low face-ism ratio. You want to show more of the body in the image.
The previous points will be true regardless of gender.
Use images of people with baby-face features when you want to convey honesty and innocence. Consider baby-face images for testimonials where trust is important. Use images of people with more mature features, when you need to convey a sense of authority and expertise.
I think most of us would like to think that we judge people based on things that go beyond physical characteristics. The simple fact is we’re biased toward people based on how they look.
Attractive features are often those more conducive to reproduction and so we tend to view those features in more positive light. There’s a reason why you see beautiful people in movies, on tv, and in advertising.
Thinking occurs in the brain. The rest of our body is used more for physical things. It’s natural that when we see more of the human body we think more of physical characteristics and when see faces in the absence of a body we think more of thoughtfulness.
Babies are innocent and helpless. They need adults to survive. Again it’s only natural that we’d see baby-face features in a similar light even in adults.
When choosing images of people for your next design consider the subconscious meanings those images will convey. Match as best you can the people in images with the message you’re trying to communicate and crop those images accordingly. Like it or not people will associate positive and negative feelings with those images based purely on physical attributes.
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