I attended ad:tech today at the Hilton New York. It was very entertaining to watch advertising experts advertise to other advertising experts. The walls, hallways, tables, escalators, food, couches, and even people were saturated in advertising.

The advertising was so dense, that the lack of advertising actually made a booth stand out significantly. For example, one group took their booth space and created a lounge for people to hangout on leather sofas and chat. As you sat there, booth reps would try to casually engage you in conversation, but they were relatively passive and certainly unoffensive. It was a breath of fresh air in the whole expo.

Anyway, I mention this story to make a point. Untrained designers often think that to bring attention to particular topic, brand, concept, instruction, or other point of focus, one must surround that object of attention with as much crap pointing to it as possible. They want to say “Look at me, I’m important,” but in the process they are surrounding their message with noise and distractions.

However, the opposite is far more effective. If you want to focus your user’s attention on something, surround it with nothing. Completely blank space. No flashing arrows, no color gradients, no sun bursts. An object sitting in the middle of nothing is a remarkably effective way to grab attention, and I ran usability tests both at my old job and in academia to prove it.

This conclusion is counter-intuitive, but as you look around at sites with good design, you can see they almost always adhere to this principle. If you want to get your users to do something, see something, read something, etc, then surround that thing with nothing. Both Google’s homepage and Google’s AdWords do this with great success. A List Apart uses lots of white space very effectively, and most would agree they are king when it comes to good design in the web 2.0 / blogging world. Look at a recent self-identified failure like overstock.com for a nice example of failing to use white space to draw attention and focus the user.