Landing on white space: Forcing a choice
I often wonder about sites like this, that have two 'columns' of content, neither of which are in the center of the page (imagine the image below if shifted to the left). So, the first thing you see when you land on the page is white space in between the two columns. White space? You are directing me to first see nothing? What's the reasoning behind this?
I can hypothesize a rationale (but if you've read some theory on this, let me know). I'm guessing its a good and really clever design to force users to make a choice and also ensure users review their options first.
When your eye first lands on the page, it lands on whitespace, at which point, you're forced to make a choice to look at the left content or right content, and actually, end up scanning both columns in order to decide. So maybe this is a good design if people predominantly come to your site for two different reasons and you want them to review both choices. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. The use of white space is interesting here though.
