Beauty optional?
Recently I’ve been looking at the excellent mySociety.org network of websites in some detail, and I was struck by this sentence on their “about us” page:
Often people use the word ‘minimalism’ when describing our interfaces, and that’s not something we’d deny.
I interpret this as an admission that the mySociey.org team considers visual design to be a low priority on their websites. Initially, this position seems appropriate given the non-profit nature of the organization, and an intuitive notion that if a service is valuable, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. However, this does not take into account what in Universal Principles of Design (by Lidwell, Holden and Butler) was termed the Aesthetic-Usability Effect.
Aesthetic-Usability Effect is the phenomenon in which aesthetically pleasing interfaces are perceived to be more usable than less aesthetic designs, and therefore more likely to be used, regardless of whether there is an actual measurable usability improvement.
This effect has substantial implications for any organization providing public facing web based services. While a niche audience might be willing to put up with a poorly designed interface, the masses probably won’t. Therefore the conclusion I draw is that if you want to achieve mass adoption of your service, beauty is not optional.
