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.

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.

Web design and web development are two entirely different things, although a person may be skilled at both. In my experience, though, web designers tend to think more like traditional artists (more free-flowing and “inspired” thoughts), and web developers tend to think more like traditional engineers (more structured and “logical” thoughts). While I think engineers should be able to design, and designers should be able to engineer, it’s not often that I come across someone who is really great at both.

What got me thinking about this? Well, in my recent search for good Wordpress themes, I found some that I generally liked, but was unhappy with the way lists and blockquotes were formatted: the list bullets and quotation marks hung outside the visual line created by the left edge of the text. This is called hanging punctuation, and creates a strong optical alignment that is pleasing to the eye, but de-emphasizes the quote or bulleted text because your eye flows over it so naturally along with the edge of the rest of the text.

Your eye will be drawn to this text because it’s not flush with the edge of the rest of the article.

At first (not having been trained in typography) I thought this hanging punctuation must be the result of engineers who did not understand good design. But then I came across Kevin Tamura’s article: Thoughts on Hanging Bullets. Hanging bullets and other punctuation is proper design for traditional (print) typography. But the Internet has changed things. Those of us who have grown up using the Internet have learned to scan pages rather than read them. We quickly look for the things that stand out most, citing those as the most important elements on the page, and ignore the body copy unless we are interested enough in the elements that stand out.

• You are much more likely to read this bullet point than the preceding or following paragraphs.

By not hanging your punctuation, you create a more scannable (not readable) page by creating contrast for these bulleted lists and pull quotes. This can pique a reader’s interest faster and encourage them to read the rest of the text.