February 1, 2007

When Design Matters Most

The "surfing" behavior of people on the web often reminds me of those crazed drivers who weave in and out of traffic at ninety miles an hour. Something about the web inspires the sort of manic, give-me-what-I-want-now behavior commonly associated with tantrum-prone two-year-olds.

Studies have shown that we evaluate websites in a fraction of a second (see Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye). And what are we judging in that brief instant? I think it's mainly design. We're taking in the design as a whole to determine if the site "looks" right. If it does, we look further and deeper, but in that first moment, design is what matters most.

Once a site passes this initial test, I believe our evaluation criterion shifts to what I think of as usefulness. Useful sites combine valuable content with good usability. Nearly all mega-popular sites are highly useful. Design, meanwhile, is likely a distant third in determining a site's ultimate popularity. However, its primacy in the first few seconds is impossible to ignore and dangerous to underestimate.

I'm not trying to make a case for good web design, as that would be like making a case for sunshine. (Naturally, examples abound of popular sites with bad designs, but this merely proves that design is not the only thing that matters in a website, which I wouldn't think needs to be proved.) Instead my point is that good web design begins from a sophisticated understanding of the medium and the behavior of people who use it. In the present case, this means devoting careful attention to what people see when they first arrive at a site, so that their first glance is not their last.

Published in Design, WWW