It’s Shiny and Makes Me Want to Click It
By Donovan Panone on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007My wife was perusing Art.com the other day looking to fill the walls of my 9-month old baby’s room. As I was looking over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice how well certain aspects of their interface were designed from a usability perspective. But then I thought…is it that the page is “usable” or is it “persuasive”?
It’s both really. But the thing that caught my eye the most was how simple the visual layer was and how it created a perception of usability. Are there only a few items on the page that make it simple? NO. And that is the beauty of it. In a recent blog post, I talked about the Misconception of Clutter and this site does a great job of illustrating my point. There are actually a lot of items on each page. But Art.com has done a great job of stripping away fancy creative elements that don’t serve a purpose and uses the power of visual design to create not just a simple, usable page; but one that subtly persuades users to follow a path towards making a purchase.
They use lots of white and very light grey tones as the base color for the site. What this does is allow the color they use for their primary calls to action to really pop. It really makes the eye focus on the primary action, which is Add To Cart. There is something about that shiny orange button that creates a gravitational pull towards clicking it. Something about it brings me back to the old dot-com days where anything that looked interesting, made me want to click it just to see what would happen. But the reason why the button brings attention to itself is not just the shiny gradient color, but the absence of color around it.
My point with all of this is that I think the role of the creative designer is often underutilized when it comes to website design. Everyone wants the site to look good and be consistent with the brand, but the creative designer plays a much more important role in User Experience design. How information and interaction elements are presented visually are critical in helping the user clearly understand them, as well as persuade them into taking the action we want them to take. Designers aren’t there just to make things look pretty…although if it’s pretty enough, it might make me want to click it.
DP - interesting that you wrote about this site. For several years (~5 now), I’ve thought they had one of the best designs around from a usability perspective (although I’m not sure I realized at the time it was ‘usability’).
One thing they’ve changed is that they used to use colored icons very well on the site too. It looks like they’ve gotten rid of those at some point along the way.
Besides that though, it looks like their site has basically remained the same. Just a good site, doing a good job at selling their product assortment.
Great points! I increasingly appreciate the role creative design plays in UX. In the past, I’ve encountered a school of thought that creative/graphic design is not important or is akin to “lipstick on a pig.” This example well illustrates the opposite; good creative design is integral to the user experience.
I also like how this article raises the notion of persuasion in UX. UX in a marketing / commerce context should strive not only to make tasks easy but to increase people’s desire to do the tasks–and even make doing the tasks enjoyable.
More specifically, I value the notion of persuasion, or rhetoric, through visual design. We tend to think of rhetoric as tied to words. But visual design has immense rhetorical power–in large part because of its subtlety. With our increasing reliance on visual interfaces, especially the web, I’ve noticed that visual rhetoric has developed into its own field. I’m not an expert, but Charles Kostelnick has some interesting work on it.