Gestalt Principles influence people’s perceptions based on knowledge. Gestalt psychology helps to focus on complex objects and perceive them as a whole. Psychology can be implemented for different types of applications like product design and medical therapy.
Gestalt principle formed by many factors, people experience, current environment, thoughts and needs.
Gestalt therapy focuses on the present. While past context is important for viewing yourself as a whole. The gestalt principle helps the user to focus on target and declutter from the cognitive load.
A reference from another source of research suggested Gestalt principle is effective some of the mental depression and anxiety. It may help people gain confidence and increase feelings of self-efficacy.
Wertheimer- Father of Gestalt Principles
Wertheimer the gentleman who invested his effort to found gestalt psychology through his observation of the Phi Phenomenon.
The phi phenomenon is an optical illusion where two stationary objects seem to move if they are shown appearing and disappearing in rapid succession.
Wertheimer concluded that we perceive things by seeing the whole perception, not by understanding individual parts. In the example of blinking lights at a train station.
Later Wertheimer , Wolfgang Kohler applied the gestalt psychology with nature and stated that organic phenomena of holism at work.
Later to Wertheimer and Köhler, Koffka is considered a founder of the field. He applied the concept of Gestalt to child psychology, the statement is that infants first understand things holistically before learning to differentiate them into parts. Let me list down Gestalt principles the various way changing people’s perception.
Gestalt Principles
Gestalt principle helps product designer to motivate and understand user expectations. Wertheimer created principles to explain how Gestalt perception functions and influence user perception.
Proximity
The principle of proximity states that objects near each other tend to be viewed as a group. Example. If you are keeping objects within the box considered as a type of object.
Similarity
This Gestalt principle suggests that we naturally group similar items together based on elements like color, size, or orientation.
People consider similar shape, size, coloured text, or graphics as a group and they treat as relevant to each other.
Continuity
According to this principle, Elements would be perceived as its arranged on a line or curve as related to each other, while elements that are not on the line or curve are seen as separate.
Closure
This principle states that elements that form a closed object will be perceived as a group. We will even fill in missing information to create closure and make sense of an object based on our knowledge and earlier experience.
Though shape has an incomplete line when it has a proper arrangement it can donate an object which already familiar to people
Common region
This Gestalt principle states that we tend to group objects together if they’re located in the same bounded area.
Pragnanz / Good Figure
This gestalt principle states that people normally perceive simplest form from complex form of reality
People initially recognize simplest shape by removing complex elements.
Application of Gestalt Principle
Trending UI UX designers mostly implementing Gestalt principles in their physical and digital product designs. Gestalt principles led designers to create clutter free intuitive user interface designs to bring simple and easy to understandable by audience.
Designers embraced Gestalt principles, using perception of contrast, color, symmetry, repetition, and proportion to create their work
Gestalt psychology has been implemented many ways as follows:
Closing: Modern UI designer and developers tend to use Cards ( UI container) to group content, images, metaphor which are related to context.
Proximity
Designers use this principle to group title and paragraph to create visual hierarchy of title, subtitle and paragraph content. Emphasized word or title creates attraction helps to focus on it.
Similarity
The principle helps to design highlight relevant content, elements together. Mostly proximity similarity jointly laid out to create grouping of objects.
Figure-ground relationship
This principle applied as the contrast between a focal object (like a word, phrase, or image) and the white space around it. This approach reduces clutter and cognitive load when have simplified content.
Industrial Product Design
Industrial product designers mostly adhered gestalt principles closure, proximity, continuity, common region, similarity to form institutive user-friendly design. When we apply these principles, user can efficiently learn and use the product.
Conclusion
Gestalt principles can be used as master concept to organize and structure the elements, objects and features to facilitate user easy to perceive and access the product.
