The Von Restorff Effect

Description: We remember things that stand out. Your attention and memory ability can be completely captured by the Von Restorff effect. Thus, the secondary information may not be seen or be forgotten by your visitors, who remember less.
---
Background:
The Von Restorff effect was identified by Hedwig von Restorff in 1933. She conducted a set of memory experiments around isolated and distinctive items, concluding that an isolated item, in a list of otherwise similar items, would be better remembered than an item in the same relative position in a list where all items were similar.

---
Application:
Stand out among competition: So back to you: what is your unique tone and personality? If you don’t know it yet, then before you move on with your business, you need to take some time to figure it out. If you don’t know what makes you unique, nobody else will. This will later impact on what you write about, how you write, your design, colors, etc.

Example:
Think of the last time you were choosing your next pair of sunglesses. How easy was it? There are hundreds of sunglasses brands and many more models to choose from. On such a “busy” market, how can you stand out?
Compare these 3 different brands for sunglasses. They all successfully stand out amid tens and tens of other brands. Each one stands for something different and they comunicate it immediately to a new visitor.

Ray Ban is a fun brand for young people

Vogue eyewear is a more mass market brand, cool, playful and feminine

Persol is an Italian brand known for its craftsmanship

---
Make the key elements on your website stand out: highlight, Use fonts, colors, and formatting to draw your visitor's eye and make the info stand out. According to the Von Restorff Effect, doing so will help customers remember this information and, if you've done your job well, increase the likelihood they will convert.

Headlines

Split your article into logical parts: Intro, Body, Closing. Then split your Body into paragraphs and give each a headline.
This is extremely helpful for people to understand what you are writing about.

This is an excerpt from Quicksprout. Every article is clearly split into section and a closing paragraph is highlighted with a subheadline

Images

Images are powerful at attracting attention. Comparing to the one-color text on a solid background, they stand out like no other item on your website. Make sure not to use too many as the clutter of images will have an opposite effect.

TED has a difficult task making their videos stand out, as they are so many. So they added feature boxes on the top. You can clearly see the difference in how noticeable each video is

Colors

One of the most effective and easiest ways to make things stand out is to use a color.You can do it in few ways.
Firstly, highlight parts of text that you want to draw attention to.
Secondly, distinguish between your active and passive colors. Your active colors are the ones used for any call to action. It’s a good practice to keep one and the same color for all of them. Whether you are asking your visitor to “read more”, click on a link or to leave a comment – use the same color. This will condition your visitors to associate this particular color with clicking on it.

Social Triggers uses purple as its active color.

You passive colors are all the rest – it’s generally the touch and feel of your website. Make sure you don’t use your active color here. Ideally, your passive and active colors would be opposite so that they contrast ever stronger. Use a simple color cirle to find the best combination.

Bolding

Bolding or Italic on the text is yet another way to make things stand out on your website. Simply bold the parts of the text that are crucial to understanding the main points of your article. As you can see, I am using bolding and italic in this article to help you navigate through it.