Our brains have evolved over millions of years to be extremely good at these kinds of tasks, learnt in wild situations where survival is critical. However we've only had a tiny amount of time to learn how to negotiate an online browsing situation. How do we respond when faced with an unfamiliar web site? (Remember, nearly all web sites are unfamiliar) That's right - we use those same advanced mental skills we've honed for millions of years, and which are hard-wired into our minds.

Web designers can't do much about the user's minds, but understanding the way the mind works, we can do a lot to make our pages easier to interact with, to maximise the user's chance of success.

We can use the power of shape-recognition to convey desired meanings. We do this by applying recognisable signs where appropriate, using tone, colour and contrast to help direct the user's eye toward the most important elements.

We can take advantage of the user's pattern-matching ability, by using techniques of alignment, proximity, hierarchy and containment to create correct visual messages.

One of the things we do when scanning is quickly to group elements, based on their proximity and patterns. This is easier when different elements are clearly distinguishable. Elements are more distinguishable when they:

• Have significant tonal and/or colour contrast compared to other elements
• Have white space around them (helps define a shape)
• Are big enough

When you see a new web page, you use your hunter's skills to scan for what's relevant to your task. You use mental rules to filter out what is less important. This saves you time and mental energy. You've developed the mental rules mainly from your web-browsing experience.

When designing a page, we can help users be successful by making the most useful elements more noticeable, and making less important elements recede. We can make pages easily scannable, by using mechanics like whitespace, colour and contrast. We can make use of design conventions, putting mundane elements in conventional places and giving them conventional styles, which helps the user instantly identify them and their purpose.

We can help the user quickly come up with correct interpretations to visual problems, by accurately identifying different elements and promoting the things the user is most likely to need. Useful techniques include:

• Clear headings and labels
• Clear hyperlinks
• Clearly differentiating form controls, such as buttons and input fields
• Highlighting key words or phrases in text