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:Â “pretty” can indeed make things more functional. What do you think?
“In Defense of Eye Candy“, by Stephen P. Anderson
