Art 337 Visibility

Have you ever heard of the expression: What you see is what you get? This expression doesn't always apply to the term visibility. Visibility is a kind of feed back, and for the most part is how users acquire information. If you can't feel or hear anything, what kind of information are you getting? Most interaction design is visual, since you can't feel more than slick glass on a phone and sometimes theres are audio responses, but not always.

Using hierarchy is one way that we can help visibility. With hierarchy, you can you can direct your users where you want to go and create a focus.

Compare the two sides of this spread, if you have a web page with hardly any visual hierarchy, the user really has no where to look first, They might start reading, but it would be safe to assume that they won't get very far or be interested in wandering your web page. Because nothing sticks out, they might not be able to find what they really need. On the right side, however, there is a texture and a flow of where the user can look. The visibility of text, images and captions seem to allow the reader to wander and they are more likely to find what they need. 

I work in the Financial Aid office on campus and at the start of every semester we deal with the SAME issue. Our office gets very busy with students, usually new students, with the same general questions. It's not uncommon that 3 out of every 5 students have the same exact question. And usually it's information that they could have found on our website. So, at the beginning of the fall semester, we decided to make the information they were looking for more visible to students. 

It seemed a little cheesy, but according to our Analytics, it was very successful.  It became the 3rd most viewed page on our website and the statistics showed that people would come, spend about a minute on that page and then about 75% of those viewers would leave our site. That told us that people came, looked for the information they needed, and then left. And our office reflected that as well. It was much less busy than prior semesters and the office staff all expressed that it was one of the least stressful semesters they had experienced, and Fall is usually the most BUSY semester in the school year. 

All we did was make the information more visible to students. all the information on the ASK ME page could have been easily found on our web page, if they knew where to look. Most new students, however, didn't know where to look. So we made it obvious.