Visual and graphical design has evolved over the years and is now known as UI design. But one crucial aspect of UI or visual designing that has remained unchanged over all these years is the importance of whitespace. Generally whitespaces are ignored by users and website owners, but they can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the design. Here you can know the reasons of using whitespaces in UI design. Before digging to the reasons, let’s see What is Whitespaces?
Whenever designers talk about whitespaces, they mean negative space. In other words, space between screen elements. Mostly it is in white colour. This space can be a colour or texture background image, or pattern, as it refers to the design’s background. On a webpage it is between buttons, images, links and text. Some of the clients consider it a waste of space but it is necessary. Here comes the question, Why is it so important? Let’s see the reasons to use Whitespace in UI design.
Whitespace is an important element of design. If used properly, it can transform a design and provide lots of benefits to your website. There is a need to develop and deliver layouts that are easy on the eyes and engage people to keep reading. Here are some of the benefits of using whitespaces in UI design.
1. Foucssing Where It Is Necessary-
Skilled designer should be capable enough to guide the users’ attention to the content and make the message unique. Really simple to over-plan, it is necessary to stay away from unnecessary mess to achieve the objective of the product. Clarity means not a boring design, a great design will justify itself rather catching the crowd’s eye. For example, Apple branding and advertising. It uses large areas of white space for simplicity and reflect the user-friendliness of its products.
2. Improved Comprehension-
Use of whitespace makes the content in design easy to scan and improves the legibility significantly. As per the research, proper use of whitespace between lines of paragraphs and its right and left margins can maximize comprehension to 20%. Small spaces between paragraphs, lines or menu items are also known as Micro Whitespaces.
3. Adds Emphasis-
What if you use whitespace for separating a design component? Human brain tend to put emphasis and importance on design elements that are surrounded by whitespace. Negative space is offering visual clues about where you must be looking, giving sufficient buffer space around a component so your brain can process it rapidly. Hence, sometimes whitespace surrounds important design components like logos so that they are clearly visible. Space can separate logos from other components so viewers get attracted by branding and didn’t get confused with other images.
4. Sophistication And Luxury-
When whitespace is used to create a certain mood or look, it can become a central element. We link a lot of white space with luxury and sophistication, so using it viably might be an approach to bring these associations to design. Too many graphics elements lowers the overall look. Instead trying to improve a design by using add white space so that you can focus on making graphics elements more better to look.
5. Guides Your Users’ Eyes-
Use of whitespace design can assist users eyes. You can do this by streamlining the content of page into less than 15 points on that page. Then fix the priority order for those points. For instance, the the first point might be logo, then navigation bar, then hero image, and later on text paragraph etc. While placing the content, one should decide on where the macro whitespace will be, means where you will put a piece of content on the screen. Macro whitespace surrounds each component or group of components. This space surrounds different components in one group or the spacing between lines, letters and paragraphs in a text.
6. Interaction Rate-
As per the analysis, an user’s average attention time span is 6 seconds. Proper use of whitespace helps the UI design to get rapidly message through users and increase the possibility of interaction by adding the call to actions. Hence, designers should create communication lines between users and design and whitespace can help more in it.
7. Invokes Imagination-
Whenever you see white space in design, it gives lots of space to imagination, that results in powerful emotional response. Human brains have need for assessing things, which creates a type of narrative between what you see and how you can process it. What our brain mark onto the whitespaces does not actually matter, thinking about it involved our mind is important. Investing in a design make sit more likely to create a good first impression.
8. Showcases The Visual Hierarchy-
Use of whitespace helps you to show the visual hierarchy between components on your page. Think about increasing or decreasing attributes like margin and padding for putting more stress on explicit components. Make sure to place essential elements like CTAs in the place where they particularly look unique.
Know the amazing mobile app ui/ux design trends at- Top 10 Mobile App UI/UX Design Trends In 2020
Whitespace is an important component in website design. It not only makes balance, but also can be used for leading a reader from an element to another.