The importance of visual design

Meet Susan. It’s a sunny Monday morning, and she’s late for a meeting. As she approaches the underground train station, she quickly consults the mapping software on her mobile device, confirming her destination before she loses her signal underground. Visual design plays an important part in helping Susan complete this task in time. It helps her see the menu options despite the sunny glare, makes search results easy to read and understand, and provides important feedback when her signal is poor.

Figure: The importance of visual design

Many mistakenly understand ‘visual design’ to mean only the way something looks — in other words, a highly subjective, possibly emotional, and often noncritical element of a project. In fact, visual design can play a much larger role in the success of any project. While the visual style, personality, colour, choice of fonts, and imagery are all part of visual design, another critical aspect is the information design, which supports an application’s functionality, contributes to its usefulness, and — ultimately — affects its chances of success.