Visual design is an essential aspect of creating compelling and effective digital products, websites, advertisements, and more. It goes beyond making products looking pretty. When done right, it improves the aesthetics of a product while also enhancing usability, connects emotionally with users, and reinforces branding guidelines.

If you take products from Apple or Nike as examples, you can see how aesthetics can have a major influence on user perception and create competitive advantages.

Paying attention to aesthetics ensures a product looks modern, up-to-date, and creates a reliable and trusted connection with users. This connection forms due to the aesthetic-usability effect, in which a user perceives a product as more efficient and easier to use because it looks better. If a product looks good, users tend to ignore usability issues and focus more on the product's benefits. Therefore, creating an attractive UI for a product is as important as adding functionality to it. “Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aestheticusability-effect/”

Usability and visual design

There are many steps we need to consider to deliver good usability. Usability is measured by the way users interact with an app: how effortless user journeys are, and the fluidity and time needed to complete tasks.

Providing a good UX is a process that requires empathy. You need to understand your audience's pain points and preferences. Part of this process includes applying user research, user interaction patterns and visual design rules and guidelines to ensure consistency, readability, content hierarchy and accessibility. These concepts are called visual design principles and help users better understand a product by making the whole experience easier, with a lower cognitive load. Some of the most important principles are:

Scale

Scale and proportion involve the relative size and dimensions of visual elements in a design. It helps create hierarchy and draw attention to focal points on the interface.

Balance

Balance refers to the distribution of visual weight in a design. It creates a sense of equilibrium and harmony. Proper balance ensures the visual organization of elements, so they do not overwhelm or distract the user.

Contrast

Contrast involves using variations in colour, size, shape, or texture to create visual interest and emphasize important elements. It helps in guiding the viewer's attention to important parts of your design.

Hierarchy

Like scale, a good hierarchy will guide the user's eye to the most important elements on your design. You can use scale, contrast, and spacing to help create an order of importance for the contents of a page.

Gestalt priciples

Gestalt principles are a theory of psychology that suggest the human brain is built to connect isolated pieces to create a whole. For example, the idea that elements placed closely together are perceived as a group. Or that elements that are similar share characteristics and functionalities.

What comes next?

Branding

Aside from usability, visual design also aligns a product to its brand. Your product needs to speak to the brand's mood, meaning it must follow the company's guidelines and language. When designing a product, make sure foundational elements like colours, imagery, iconography, typography, and marketing content are in sync with company branding decisions and ideas.

Applying branding concepts will also guide the visual approach and tone of a design. For example, a more modern and asymmetric design will convey a dynamic idea. On the other hand, a more standard and symmetric design will create a sense of balance and calmness.

Tidying up the elements of an interface with branding concepts is a very important stage of the product journey. This is how the user will connect the digital product they're using to its company or brand. This also gives the user a sense of safety and reassurance that they're in the right place.

Trends

People are driven by taste and what they consider good or bad, also known as user preferences. User preferences may vary depending on age, beliefs, culture, and trends.

Over the past decade, visual design trends have evolved to reflect changes in technology, user preferences, and cultural shifts. The evolution of platforms and rise of websites, mobile, and TV interfaces also influenced the way we understand efficiency in design and attraction to visually appealing products.

The concept of flat designs has replaced skeuomorphic design. Skeuomorphic design is the idea of mimicking real-world objects, with the assumption that familiar elements make interactions with a product easier. Instead, the concept of flat design embraces simplicity, minimalism, and clean lines, focusing on solid colours, simple shapes, and iconography.

Another visual trend is a combination of the two concepts: Neumorphism. While keeping a bit of the 3D look of skeuomorphic design, this new tendency prioritizes usability and tries to modernize the look of a design.

With the growth of modern technologies like the Apple's Vision Pro, a new trend is arising: the spacial UI. While it's still not largely explored (yet), this trend promises a more immersive interaction by adding depth to give users the illusion and feeling of reality as if they were inside the interface.

When doing your design keep in mind the audience you are speaking to. Following visual trends and user preferences is another great way to emotionally connect with them. It creates a feeling that you are both speaking the same language.

What should we look for when we design?

As we've already discussed, visual design enhances usability but also creates emotional connections with our users and aligns the look and feel of a product to its brand.

Research is another powerful tool used to measure the usability of a product. Using research, we can ensure we fulfill the needs of users and deliver an effective and user-friendly product. One of the most efficient methods to check for usability issues is testing products. This method also helps us understand how a product performs and any pain points that arise before we finish the design journey.

However, user-testing tends to focus heavily on Single Usability Metrics (SUM) to measure certain aspects of the user journey, like time on task, success rate, and errors. But is that enough? I tend to disagree. :)

It's already a given that products need to be usable. To deliver this, usability and efficiency are the first, but not the last, steps to delivering a good product. What comes next in this process is what will make your product stand out and differentiate it from a product you find easy to use to a product you love to use.

But how do we do that? How do we create products that are both useful but also delight users? Simple. We do that by using visual design as a tool to not only improve usability, but also deliver experiences that emotionally connect with users and are visually appealing to their eyes.

In most cases, designers stop working on their design concepts when their product reaches a level that shows good usability. Ideally, these concepts can be pushed to a greater level to also make sure they are visually attractive.

So, how do we understand that a product is visually attractive to users? By doing user testing that not only focuses on user behaviours like functionality, content, or performance. You should also consider things like user attitude and emotion towards a product.  This can be achieved by giving users the ability to describe the interface of the design without interacting with it, allowing them to focus on the interface and evaluate its design without any functionality distractions.

Making an aesthetically good product has benefits beyond the usability of it (aesthetic-usability effect) because it can also increase the product's perceived value. Products that look better are perceived as better products. For example, well branded packaging gives the impression that the contents of the package are of a higher quality. Another example is cars – a car with a better design will look like it drives better.

When creating designs, it's important to remember the goal you are trying to achieve. Disconnecting the aesthetic aspect of a product from its design process can significantly impact it. After all, humans are attracted to beautiful and pleasing experiences. We like to look good, dress well, and decorate our houses. Why would digital products or experiences be any different? If you want to impact your users and create connections, deliver experiences that go beyond how easy they will be! :)