I’ve just discovered a post from smashingmagazine.com which said:
“When it comes to building customer’s trust in your company, a professional, trustworthy design becomes crucial. In the Web, people are very likely to mistrust online-business, so you better make sure that you appear credible and serious.”
This got me thinking back to a discussion I had on an interface that was being developed with Swing (Java). Swing was very difficult to adapt to the more stylised design required for the project. It was fine for something basic like a form-based mortgage calculator, but if you wanted to do something more creative, it was difficult.
As the usability expert on the project, I knew that professional design is critical to making sure the users get a good feeling about the system. The project was slipping badly and was several months late.
Heading Towards a Design Disaster
Senior managers were keen to cut development time, especially with the user interface. They wanted to give more priority to things that were important from a technical perspective, but would seldom be used by the users, like speeding up the printer by rewriting the printer drivers. I was put under a lot of pressure to back down but I made the point that one of the key ways the new system would be judged would be how effective the user interface was, since that was going to be used all day, everyday by the staff.
To add a bit more weight to my argument, I found a study conducted at Stamford
(PDF), which really helped make the point that cutting corners on a multi-millon pound interface was a bad idea.
Stamford University’s Study into Credibility
This is a key quote from the study:
“Beautiful graphic design will not salvage a poorly functioning Web site. Yet, the study shows a clear link between solid design and site credibility. Participants said they were more likely to believe Web sites that looked professionally designed and appeared visually appropriate to the subject matter. It’s clear from the data that Web users do not overlook simple cosmetic mistakes, such as spelling or grammatical errors. In fact, the findings suggested that typographical errors have roughly the same negative impact on a Web site’s credibility as a company’s legal or financial troubles.”
Stanford-Makovsky Web Credibility Study 2002
Investigating what makes Web sites credible today
Note: although I was working on a massive project, where a professional look and feel is essential, credbility always suffers when the interface lacks polish and elegance no matter what site a website it. Frankly, it makes web marketing for small businesses impossible because of the loss of credibility.
So, before making some changes to your website make sure the updates are going to add to your credibility, if your want to make web marketing easier for your business.
If your site doesn’t look as professional as your competitors, you need to fix it now….
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