How many times did you hear that person’s taste should not be discussed? I did millions of times—usually as an end of the discussion argument. But how does it reflect on website design? Does making a pretty website is enough to sustain the interest?
Published in · 6 min read · Apr 9, 2020
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Let me introduce you the attractiveness bias theory known as cognitive bias.
Think about a person with outstanding fashion. It will draw our attention, and maybe encourage us to interact with that person, however, if there will be no other values, such as a great personality, we will lose interest and eventually move on to interact with someone else. It is the same with websites. If the website’s aesthetics are nice but the structure is poor or content unrelated, then we will move to another website. Therefore, the attractiveness bias theory proves that a well-designed product will draw attention but may not hold it for long.
A badly designed website or any product, in contrast, will not attract the user’s attention even if it is an excellent product.
At this point I would like to cite one of my favourite quotes used by Steve Job to a designer working at NeXT:
“You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog sh*t for frosting.” —Steve Job
Websites need to be designed well, they need to look well, be pleasing and simple. Today no one likes to interact with a badly design website, and that results in very low traffic which eventually can lead to the collapse of a business.
The idea of judging the book by its cover is harsh — but it follows us everywhere, despite we like it or not.
Let’s take an academic background for example. You would think, that in such an environment the attractiveness would be your last concern — wrong. According to Sean N. Talamas’ studies, physically attractive students are in favour of receiving better grades than their less-attractive peers, partly because perceived as more intelligent, which is not always the case. More than that—the more attractive students are, the more chances they have to get a place in the university, eliminating less attractive candidates during interviews.
This is because attractive people are perceived as healthier, more sociable, talented and successful.
There is an interesting experiment named Predicting Elections: Child’s Play! suggesting how brutal the attractiveness bias can be, even among children. The group of researchers asked kids to choose their imaginary boat captain from several photographs of actual politicians, which were unknown to children. In most of the cases, children picked up the most attractive candidate. The choices of 5-years old kids predicted the result of past political elections with an accuracy of almost 80%.
As I already mentioned before, a good design will catch the attention, but it will not sustain it. Therefore, if we compare the use of attractiveness bias in political, academic and even workplace environment, we can predict the results of choices driven by visual preferences. A pretty politician, student and a work colleague, despite being attractive may fail in the longer run, showing very little skills needed for their position.
We may not be able to control our attractiveness bias but we can learn from them — especially in website design.
As an example of bad design, I would like to use the Power City website. For those of you who don’t know, Power City is an electronic retailer in Ireland. The chain company is quite popular across the country, however, struggles with nearly non-functional and unattractive website resulting in very low online traffic.
As you can see, the website had sustained its aesthetics probably since the early 2000s. It has no hierarchy of information, no colour theory, very confusing structure, and outdating style. Now, if you would actually spend some time on the website, you would learn that they offer great deals comparing to their competitors. However, with very little clarity and consistency on the website people seem to bounce off quickly, and why wouldn’t they? There is plenty of such retailers to choose from, which seem more trustworthy when it comes to online purchasing.
Now let’s compare Power City with another website, similarly complex.
MediaMarkt is also an international electric retailer. For some of us, it may not be attractive but their navigation and layout systems are clear and understandable for a user and to catch the attention, MediaMarkt is using hierarchy and bright colours.
We don’t need to stop electric retailers. A lot of fashion websites also maintain a huge number of products and display them in a very simple, yet, attractive way just like Nike.ie
What Nike does to sustain the interest is introducing a lot of white space around the content. This way, the user can focus on the important information without any distractions. They don’t use any colour in their design, except colourful pictures — which automatically catch the user’s attention on the product.
