Visual Design
Your design has 500 milliseconds (or 0.5 seconds) to help users form an opinion about your website, and whether they will stay or leave
(Lindgaard et al 2006)
Visual design is so important to provide support to your underlying user experience. But on it’s own, it’s not enough. At the heart of a design is the user experience. You need both great visual design and great usability to achieve excellence.
Definition:
A disciplined and judicious use of graphic design so that user experience leads the process and visual design adds beauty to a solid underlying interface. This is important to avoid the classic mistake of creating “eye candy” with a poor underlying experience, otherwise known as “putting lipstick on a pig”.
Benefits
- Keep UX and Visual design under the same roof, so that each discipline does not go off track.
- Use Visual Design according to best practice, at the end of the UX planning phase.
- Leverage our superior understanding of usability to deliver a compelling visual design.
Methods we use:
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop.
Deliverables:
Compositions (AI, PSD). We can also provide front-end code (CSS 3, HTML5 and XML/XAML/ WPF).
Our Design Portfolio
Google researchers (Tuch et al 2012) confirmed earlier studies showing that users make a split-second impression about your site, impacting credibility and perceived ease of use. In fact certain design elements are judged by your user’s unconscious mind even more quickly, in 17 milliseconds (or 0.017 seconds). Users like designs with low visual complexity and that follow UI/UX conventions for your category, their research shows.
When to Do:
- After wireframes have been finalized.
- After conducting usability testing to make improvements (eg. a re-design).
- Typically at the end of a UX planning process- not as a starting point!
How to use with Lean UX:
- Visual design can be used to quickly mock up a direction in conjunction with wireframe discussions.
- Graphic design can be used earlier on, at the wireframe stage, for Mobile UX projects. Mobile prototypes are better tested with some visual design we have found.
- Create visual designs more quickly with ‘Design Studios’, a collaborative wireframe process.