Gut Reaction: Your Design Does Matter

Patrick Lynch has written a great article, Visual Decision Making, over on A List Apart. It’s about time someone stuck up for designers against the eye-tracking studies that have become the de facto measurement for online usability. Lynch doesn’t discount or even dispute eye-tracking results, but he puts them in proper context.

It’s kind of a long article, especially when you consider that the article is pretty much discussing a user’s first 1/20th of a second they spend with your site.  It’s definitely worth a read, but if you would prefer (Joe’s) Cliff’s Notes, they’re below:

“Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view. [8] Those user judgments begin within 50 milliseconds of seeing the first page of your site.”

“Smart graphic design is always some balance of current expressive trends, information architecture, classical layout aesthetics, and detailed research on user preferences and motivations. You should never ignore solid user experience data, but mountains of data won’t auto-magically build you a successful site. Design is a synthetic activity. It can be informed by the results of analysis, but the tools of analysis don’t create beautiful designs.”

It’s nice to get scientific validation that all those late nights spent perfecting a web site design does indeed do so much to shape a user’s opinion of the site and company brand. However, it’s a little frustrating to know that we spend dozens of hours coming up with something that is processed in less than a second.