Some of you are saying, “duh,” but judging by the number of ugly, hard-to-use websites out there, not everyone understands this principle: people trust things that look better and are easier to use. I’m sure I’ve also read an article about how this is true with people too—beautiful people seem more trustworthy than ugly ones. (If you find the article that talks about this, please let me know.)

There are a couple implications of this rule. The one you’re not supposed to take away from this is that if you’re a scammer, making your web site look more professional will catch more people. The correct thing we should learn from this study is that if you’re a legitimate business trying to provide value to your customers, making your web site look better will help your visitors feel that legitimacy.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article today about results posted by Compete Inc. showing that Facebook has passed up Google as the largest source of traffic for Yahoo and MSN portals as well as other sites.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities.”

-Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc. (a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services)

Intuit has gotten in on the social media frenzy, calling its way of getting customers to refer friends “friend-casting.” Heck, they don’t need to trick me into advertising for them—I’ll do it for free. I’ll be getting my largest return by far this year and it took less than an hour using their TurboTax Freedom Edition, which lets you file your federal and state taxes for free if you qualify.

Alright Intuit, let’s see how many referrals you get from this social media buzz.

Check out the full article (about Facebook, not TurboTax) here: Facebook directs more online users than Google.

Copyblogger posted some great findings on how crappy landing pages kill email campaigns. Here’s the summary:

• Business-to-consumer companies are more likely to use readable URLs than business-to-business firms
• Nearly 50% of the landing pages studied failed to repeat the email’s call to action
• 6 out of 10 companies use landing pages to sell products/services; other goals include lead generation, branding, and education (educate target audiences, support product usage)
• 17% of email marketing campaigns (mostly business-to-consumer) dumped recipients at the company’s home page as opposed to a unique campaign landing page
• 35% of landing pages failed to match the look, feel and tone of the original email
• Only 36% of the landing pages used the recommended one-column format; 25% used two-column formatting
• 9 out of 10 landing pages had the main call to action above the fold, but of those pages that had copy continuing past the natural fold, only 11% had additional calls to action adjacent to the below-the-fold copy

Here’s a short, but insightful article from Minimali.st about making your application’s user interface invisible, which is a goal for interface design on the iPad. The gist of it is that users want to focus on content, not the interface, so make interface controls as invisible as possible while emphasizing the actions those controls perform. One way to de-emphasize buttons is to remove the stylistic touches (color, gradient, shadow, etc.) from less important ones and only stylize the buttons with the most important actions to draw attention to that action. Read the full article here: De-emphasize User Interface Controls.

From Component House:

1. Review your icons
2. Unrelated information shouldn’t be displayed together
3. Use the right punctuation or appropriate separators
4. Redundancy increases complexity
5. Identify and remove conflicting ideas
6. Hide unnecessary precision
7. Fix typos
8. Sentences with the right meaning
9. Alignment
10. Creativity saves the day

For the details and some hilarious example graphics, read the full article: Ten UI Lessons from the Real World.