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1. Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable. As a non-designer who's had to fight many designers on this, I'd like to dr
by mekoka 6y ago
1. Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.
As a non-designer who's had to fight many designers on this, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that this is about perception. It's about a user's first impression regarding usability prior to actually using the system. It's not an actual impression based on their experience after interacting with it. That impression can quickly evaporate the moment they try to do anything with the interface. If time and money have to be allocated to develop a product, use them wisely. The properties of this principle seem to be more relevant to marketing and advertising than actual UX.
I believe that the wrong take-away from reading this law would be that improved esthetics implies improved usability. Attempting to place esthetics and function on the same pedestal would be a mistake. When it comes to usability, function is superior to esthetics and should almost always be given priority, no matter how ugly.
I agree that esthetics can and should be used in a way that it supports function, but as you add to it, there will always be a point of negative return (functionally speaking). If you misunderstand what that law is saying you might be misled into thinking that esthetic climax and usability climax are on the same locus. I think we can agree that something can often still be made even more beautiful way past the point where it's almost completely unusable. Adversely, you might be called into making something uglier in order for it to become useful again. Better get comfortable with the idea.
- 627467 6y agoI'm a designer (maybe of the less designry sort) and I agree that I would have moved the 1st law further down and added more clarifying context here to avoid the misunderstandings you listed.
- peferron 6y agoI find this principle useful when users come with negative preconceptions against the usability of your product, perhaps because of previous iterations that weren't very usable or because they tried other products in the same space that weren't very usable. Putting additional effort on aesthetics can encourage these users to consider your product with fresh eyes, or give it a chance when they otherwise wouldn't. Of course, past that initial help you need "real" usability to keep them. For example, I would pay a lot of attention to this principle if I was working on a product in the payment space (e.g. Stripe), taxes (e.g. TurboTax), etc.
- bobbles 6y agoI feel like #1 is the reason that absolutely every useful web app is slowly becoming less useful to the people that use it every day by filling all the actual usable space with white to make their screenshots look better while all the power users get more and more irritated. Even 'compact' views which seem to be a throwaway effort to alleviate these are becoming more and more spacious and forcing scrolling even on huge screens.