“This design is so bad! Why did they change it?!” — a friend

Recently a company slack channel exploded with a visceral emotional reaction to Amazon’s redesign of the AWS Portal. They were upset with the changes Amazon made to the AWS portal.

Time to revisit an old concept.

A little over a decade ago I wrote a commentary on how lines affect design. That article describes how our brains are wired to see edges and lines. This can be beneficial when we are looking for objects (or say, an approaching car) but can create overwhelm when a visual design uses too many lines.

Here is the before and after of the AWS portal:

So what do we see between these two designs?

In the older design, Amazon used a visual design that made it easier to find the cards on the dashboard. The edges were understated, and our brains are able to quickly detect what are objects and what is in the background. In terms of Gestalt principles, the rules of human visual perception, the white cards are the figures and the gray background is the ground (Wikipedia: Figure–ground).

Save brain cycles…deemphasize edges!

In the updated AWS design, this figure–ground relationship is diminished. Suddenly we are experiencing a version of flat design that is akin to Apple’s early attempts at flat design in iOS 7 (2013) which were rectified in iOS 8 (2014) — see iOS 7 v iOS 8.

Lines draw your eye, and in the case of AWS the goal should be to draw your eye to the content, not the edges. Emphasized lines can increase the amount of work our brains must do to understand what we are looking at, as it activates the edge detection in our visual cortex. Save brain cycles, deemphasize edges!

Gestalt Principles are fundamental, and yet their incorporation can still prove challenging. I suspect we will see this theme return as the great wheel of design continues to turn, but the laws of visual perception will remain the same.

Here’s to hoping more people can incorporate fundamental principles into their designs.

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — WINSTON CHURCHILL

A portrait of Winston Churchill by James Guthrie

Winston Churchill, by James Guthrie