We need beautiful websites

When I talk about usable websites with some of my non-ux collegues, I often hear remarks about them being dull. We (as UXers) often forget to evangelise the fact that attractiveness contributes to the user experience of a website.

Lack of visual design doesn’t lead to a necessarily usable result.  Someone wise once said “There is no ‘no design’ there is only good design and bad design”, they couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

User experience design and Visual design must work together to guide the user through a website. The line height of text must be high enough, so that it is easy to read. White space (you remember it, that place where ads oft creep) provides focus to your websites calls to action. All these things are important because they allow website users to easily focus on each different element on the page. They can do this without having to struggle to differentiate between one thing and another. White space is clarity and clarity allows users to quickly and easily make the choices that they want to, the choices that you provided them with.

Peter Morvilles honeycomb diagram shows us how good websites are comprised of many different charactoristics. Visual design has a huge impact on the credibility  and the desirability of a website. The challenge for designers is to marry up the components seamlessly e.g. visual designers and user experience designers must collaborate over matters of credibility and usability to achieve the optimal result in designs.

My experience of this kind of collaboration is built on design team members who have a great deal of respect for each other, working together informally throughout the design process. This works well for me.

How do you ensure the best visual and experience design compatibility?