Before a user interacts with your carefully considered content, your excellent navigation structure and slick search bar, their first impression comes from the look of the website – the colours, graphics, and overall design elements that are used. As people are spending more and more time on the web, they are less tolerant of websites that don’t look good (and credible).
While a website is not an art installation, it is a design project, and the fundamentals of good design apply. While much of the visual design expertise will come from the graphic designer, it’s valuable for the UX practitioner to know the following principles of visual design.
Colour
Colour has an incredible psychological effect on people. Based on our culture, preferences and learned cues, people interpret colours in very specific ways – and this can be used to inform and steer the user’s experience. When choosing the colour palette for the website, be aware of legibility and
accessibility concerns. Using a lot of open or white space often makes sites appear
simple and easy to read.
Imagery
The choice of images used on the website can have a massive effect on how users behave and interact on the page. You can never be quite certain which images will have the best results, so this is one area where you will need to do a lot of testing (more on that below).
Humans tend to gravitate towards and identify with pictures of other humans. We have an innate instinct to look at faces to understand a person’s feelings and mood – and we even look in the same direction as these characters, according to usability specialist James Breeze (Breeze, 2009).
