Bad Design Will Cost You Customers

Design is much more than simply making things look pretty. A “fresh coat of paint” won’t help you if the overall usability and usefulness of your website or product is flawed.

However, making things look attractive is an important part of design. A website’s visual design not only conveys the personality of your company through its style, typography, and color, but it’s also how people determine if they can trust your site. The same way you wouldn’t go into a messy, dirty, run-down store, you probably wouldn’t shop online at an amateur-looking, disorganized website with missing photos and broken links.

A List Apart’s article In Defense of Eye Candy discusses many of these topics. It also brings up Donald Norman’s tests when he looked to answer the question “Do attractive products actually work better?”

Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

Your site’s design is important to your customers on many levels: how they perceive your company, whether they can trust you, and even how successful they are at using your site. The design of your website or product should not be an afterthought. Good design needs to be an integral part of your company, otherwise it’s probably costing you customers.