How To Grab (And Hold) Their Attention

Think of a row of boring brown houses, with one bright shiny pink one. Which one do you notice? Which one will you remember?

That's not a trick question. It's a psychological principle called the Von Restorff Effect — our brain's automatic tendency to notice, focus on, and remember what stands out from everything else around it. Your brain isn't choosing to pay attention to the pink house. It can't help it. The contrast does the work.

Product teams that understand this can use it to grab and hold attention in those crucial first minutes of use. And teams that don't understand it build onboarding experiences where everything looks equally important — which means nothing looks important, which means the user stares at the screen wondering where to start.

That's a design problem. And it's one of the easiest ones to fix, once you see it.

Your users are overwhelmed. Help their brains out.

When someone opens your product for the first time, everything is new. Every button, every menu, every label, every section. Their brain is scanning for a foothold — one thing that says "start here."

If your interface treats everything with equal visual weight, you're asking a brand-new user to make a decision they don't have enough context to make. That's decision fatigue, and it kicks in fast. The user doesn't think "I'll figure this out later." They think "this looks like a lot of work" — and their brain starts pulling them back toward the familiar tools where they already know where everything is.

The Von Restorff Effect is your antidote. When one element is visually distinct from everything around it, the brain locks onto it automatically. No instructions needed. No tooltip required. The contrast does the guiding.

Duolingo gets this right. Their onboarding UI uses bright, celebratory animations to mark completed lessons, with colorful buttons and engaging icons — including that impossible-to-ignore green owl — guiding users to the next step. The vibrant elements pop against the clean background. You never wonder what to do next because the next thing is always the most visually distinct thing on the screen.

Canva does it too. When new users open the platform, a bold "Create Your First Design" button jumps out against the minimalist interface. The contrast is deliberate. The button is big, colorful, and unmissable — and everything else recedes. The result is zero decision fatigue. You know exactly where to begin.

How to use this in your first experience

The Von Restorff Effect isn't complicated, but it's easy to misuse. The goal isn't to make everything pop. It's to make the right thing pop — and let everything else fade into the background. Here's how.

Guide their focus to one action per screen. Every screen in your onboarding should have one primary action that's visually distinct from everything else. One button that's a different color. One card that's highlighted. One path that's obvious.

This sounds simple, but look at most product dashboards and count the number of things competing for attention. Settings icons, notification badges, sidebar items, empty states with multiple CTAs, feature announcements. Every one of those is a distraction that dilutes the Von Restorff Effect. The more things you make stand out, the less any of them do.

Use visual contrast — color, size, whitespace, animation — to direct attention to the single most important action. And be ruthless about removing competing distractions from the first experience. You can surface all that other stuff later. Right now, the user needs exactly one obvious next step.

Make progress visually distinct from what's left to do. One of the most powerful applications of the Von Restorff Effect is showing the user what they've accomplished versus what's ahead. When completed steps look visually different from remaining steps — different color, different state, a checkmark, a glow — the user gets two things at once: a sense of progress and a clear signal of where to go next.

This is why progress bars work, and it's why Duolingo's completed-lesson animations are so effective. The contrast between "done" and "not yet" creates a visual pull toward the next action. The user doesn't have to read instructions. The design tells them where they are and where to go.

Present one concept at a time. The Von Restorff Effect only works when there's a clear figure-ground relationship — one thing that stands out against a background of things that don't. If you throw five new concepts at the user simultaneously, nothing stands out. The brain can't pick a winner.

So introduce things sequentially. One new idea per screen. One new capability per step. Each one gets its moment of visual distinction, the user processes it, and then you move on. This is how you build understanding without overwhelming — and it's how you keep the brain's attention system working for you instead of against you.

Don't make everything stand out. This is the mistake that kills the effect entirely. When every element is bold, bright, colorful, and animated, you haven't created contrast. You've created noise. The user's brain can't find the signal because there is no signal — just a wall of visual intensity.

Be intentional with contrast. If everything is emphasized, nothing is. The power of the Von Restorff Effect comes from restraint — from having the discipline to make one thing visually dominant and let everything else remain muted. Guide, don't confuse.

You already know this works

You've experienced this principle reading this very post. When I bolded key phrases earlier, your eyes were drawn right to them. You didn't decide to read those words first. Your brain just did it, because the contrast was there.

That's the Von Restorff Effect working in real time. And if it works on a simple blog post, imagine what it does inside a product where a new user is actively looking for a foothold.

Your users showed up motivated. They clicked the CTA. They signed up. They're in. But their brain is overwhelmed by the newness of everything they're seeing, and it's desperately searching for where to focus.

Give it one clear, visually distinct place to land. Make progress feel obvious. Let the contrast do the heavy lifting. And remember that in those first critical minutes, the best thing you can do for a new user isn't to show them everything your product can do. It's to show them the one thing they should do right now — and make it impossible to miss.