Hierarchy: Universal Design Principles

The hierarchy provides the user with a roadmap to navigate through your design. In an era where attention span is limited and highly sensitive, hierarchy can be a resource to make reading easier and ensure that users find what they need while motivating them to explore further. Hierarchy: Universal Design Principles

Hierarchy in design is very important. Many other universal design principles such as alignment, visual weight, balance, etc., can help influence a hierarchical structure with consistency in your design. In this case, the hierarchy focuses on a “top-level” overview of how to create order in user interface design.

Typographic hierarchy

We usually skim through the content first and then continue reading only if it caught our attention. Next, in the heat map, you can see the pattern that we follow when we leaf through a text.

The red and yellow areas represent where we pay the most attention. And with this example, we can see that normally it is leafed from top to bottom first and from right to left. The typographic hierarchy allows you to organize your content in a way that makes it easier for readers to find the information that is most relevant to your needs.

The typographic hierarchy could be structured in a basic way in headings, followed by the text. If you are familiar with headings in HTML, you will know that there are six levels of headings that can be applied to content, although using more than 3-4 levels becomes difficult to follow. Also, these headings are key to SEO, if your design is targeting some kind of web service.

Hierarchy: Universal Design Principles

However, the order of these headings should not strictly follow this order in your designs, although you should find the balance for good SEO. 

Conclusion

In general, the hierarchy not only helps the user to find the most relevant information, but it can also be used to guide users in the a direction that you think is preferred, so remember also not to forget to add the action button design "CTA ” To create a new path and thus guide the user through the actions they can take.