The Importance of Design According to Data (Video)

Everyone likes something that looks good, a piece of art that holds your gaze, a cool movie poster that conveys the emotion of a film, or a beautiful website that is a joy to interact with. But is design actually important? When it comes to website or mobile interface architecture, it actually is incredibly impactful. According to a slew of data, design is not only important but it can be the difference between a successful product or just another item that is lost in the noise of a crowded consumer landscape.

According to a study on humans and computers, 75% of people will actually base the credibility of a business on how the website looks [1]. Think about that for a moment. You could have a revolutionary product, one that can’t be beat by competitors, but if your website looks like it came out of a time capsule from 1998, users will bail for a more professional site. This might sound like an inditement on customers, but the truth is, when shopping for a product or service, a potential buyer is going to make their decision on a variety of factors, including perceived credibility. When comparing two websites and one looks brand new and cute but the other looks old and outdated, credibility may very well be attributed negatively or positively respectively. This is a statement that might sound suspect to some, but according to the data, it’s a real factor.

Similarly, from a mobile site standpoint, 57% of users won’t even bother recommending a business if their mobile site performs poorly [2]. According to a study by adobe, one in four people will outright stop engaging with websites that don’t display or perform well on their mobile device [3]. Is this the result of spoiled users with a variety of optimized applications? Possibly so, but the bottom line is the look and performance of your site on mobile and desktop has a dramatic impact on your potential audience.

We are all inundated with constant ads, visuals, and graphics to catch our eye and keep our attention. How can those attempting to stand out truly do so in such a noisy consumer landscape? Thanks to emerging data, we know one important way is through design. The few pieces of information here are just an example of how pivotal design really is in our increasingly virtual world.

SOURCES

Video music provided courtesy of the talented Ikson.
Track title: Spring
Artist: Ikson

[1] Fogg, B.J. (May 2002). "Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility." A Research Summary from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanford University. www.webcredibility.org/guidelineshttps://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html

[2] Sillence, Elizabeth & Briggs, Pamela & Fishwick, Lesley & Harris, Peter. (2004). Trust and mistrust of online health sites. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 663-670. 10.1145/985692.985776.

[3] Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek & J. Brown (2006). Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!, Behaviour & Information Technology, 25:2, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/01449290500330448 http://www.t-sciences.com/news/humans-process-visual-data-better

Adobe (2015). The State of Content: Expectations on the Rise, Adobe Creative Blog. https://blogs.adobe.com/creative/files/2015/12/Adobe-State-of-Content-Report.pdf

https://socpub.com/articles/5-mobile-marketing-mistakes-%E2%80%93-and-how-to-fix-them-12441