Functional AND Pretty
Recently a friend shared a link to a little website he’d built. He admitted that design is not his thing, but said the site was “meant to be functional, not pretty”. I’m sure it was an off-hand comment, not meant to insult the worth of good design. But nonetheless it illustrates how some people think that design is just putting a pretty coat of paint on things.
I could go off here and discuss how interaction design is so crucial to a good user experience. But instead let’s talk briefly about “pretty-ness”.
The article “In Defense of Eye Candy” is a great discussion of why design is so much more than an inconsequential coat of paint. The aesthetics of a website (which the author argues is not just visual but also other sensory perceptions), affect how we feel. And studies show that how we feel cannot be separated from how we think. For instance, in one study, users rated identical search results better or worse depending if they thought the results came from Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. The association with a particular brand (a matter of both aesthetic perception and past experiences), affected a thought process which one would expect to be entirely logical.
So I think that this article supports what I already believed: “pretty” can indeed make things more functional. What do you think?
“In Defense of Eye Candy“, by Stephen P. Anderson
I agree. I once showed my sister an ad for a sightseeing company that offered small plane aerial tours. I found the font lip-smacking and very evocative, and I ‘felt’ things about the business and what it was offering and those feelings were independent of the actual information being imparted in the text.
She said, “I don’t get it”. I showed her an ad for something similar, with plainjane (apologies to all non-plain janes) fonts and no visual punch, and she said, “Ohhhhh…. now I get it.”
As a concept it is difficult to understand and even more difficult to explain non-visually, ie. talking about it.
A great example is the huge design factor in all of Apple’s product offerings. They’re just plain BEAUTIFUL, as tools, or objects d’art. Whereas PCs, bless their humble ex-IBM/FBI presentation… just aren’t.
So if someone goes out an invests a quarter of a million dollars in redoing their house to convert it to a stunning bed & breakfast, and then builds a web site for it with logomakeronline.com and wordpress templates straight out of the box and off the free site to boot there’s no way you’re putting up an accurate representation for your business and you’re going to feel it on the bookings side.
That’s why businesses ought to hire professionals – like Tzaddi – to take commoditized software like Wordpress and make it zing with uniqueness and brand. Duh.
Laurie — June 2nd, 2009, 4:06 pmThanks Laurie. You make a good point about how it’s a difficult concept to explain non-visually. A more visual representation of this might make a very good post for me to do as a follow-up. Hmmm…
Tzaddi — June 2nd, 2009, 5:33 pm