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.

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.