Yclick.it - A Blog Exploring Persuasive Website Design

Use Highlighting to Focus the Visitor’s Attention

We spoke about designing for scanning and skimming recently. Today we have a further two examples of sites using highlighting. But these ones are being used to focus the visitor’s attention on a call to action.

The first is on the 37signals jobs board. A dark yellow highlight immediately draws your attention to their call to advertise. ‘Post a job and find the right person’ is nicely reassuring and the text underneath lets us know the cost and duration without committing to a click.

Notice also among the job listings, how the job title is being used as the link text. This nicely helps to optimise the linked page for that text which helps those job ads get out there among the search results. The result - more chance of that ad finding the right person!

Etre is a user experience agency based in the UK. I first came across them when I watched a video demonstrating their eye tracking service. Clearly based on their homepage, they want visitors to be able to find this service.

‘Looking for Eye Tracking?’ is highlighted in a dull light yellow. The minimal and rather cool colour palette for the page means this is pretty much the brightest element on the page. It emphasises the keywords ‘eye tracking’ and provides a link to find out more.

Conclusion

Highlighting can be used to effectively emphasise a call to action:

• Using text instead of a graphic makes it easier to include more specific text and more importantly trigger words or keywords.
• And using highlighting once on screen can help to immediately focus the visitor on one element.

Of course to prove that we would probably have to do an eye tracking study. But I’m guessing etre might know a thing or two from their previous studies!