Gestalt Principles in eCommerce
Websites in the 1990s often looked ugly and were difficult to use due to poor design practices. Early sites had cluttered layouts, inconsistent colors, and lacked visual organization—there were no established design standards, and little attention was given to user experience. Enter Gestalt principles . "Gestalt" means "unified whole" in German. In the 1920s, psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler developed Gestalt principles to understand how people make sense of what they see and hear. They identified laws explaining the mind's natural tendency to perceive individual elements as a cohesive whole. Graphic designers quickly adopted these principles to create more organized, eye-catching designs. We see these principles applied in popular e-commerce sites to create intuitive and engaging user experiences. 1. Proximity Proximity is one of the most commonly used principles. Elements that are close to each other tend to be perceived as a...