Consumers Have Choice – Don’t Let Your Design Make It Easy for Them!

So you don’t feel design plays a part in first impressions? Guess again! A study by researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2012 revealed that it takes two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, give or take a nanosecond. This makes it increasingly important, as the ability to obtain good design is growing, to ensure that we are doing all we can to get that favorable recognition. This is extremely important for small business, as a poor design can often lead to trust issues, an essential factor for smaller enterprises attempting to build their brand.

What can you do to promote good design?

The very first thing to do is to give this some thought. The competition has. Using a plan for presenting your brand and products to the world is largely accomplished by a carefully thought-out plan. Another significant finding in that study was that your logo gets the most attention, followed closely by images and social interaction. The visual elements matter considerably! So now that we have an understanding, there are essentially no excuses remaining, as now cost is not any longer a viable excuse for getting good design work done. The advent of crowdsourcing sites like 99Designs, CrowdSpring and others made what was once prohibitively expensive for small business, a very affordable item.

How are the benefits?

The benefits of good design in your business are numerous and sometimes intangible. While a visual redesign of your website is fairly obvious, other things like product packaging, your print and web advertising, and even site graphics are shared, Pinned and ReTweeted from your webpages. We are observing every day just how much this can impact your site’s reach and customer base. What’s more, that special feeling that visitors get when viewing a superb design may be hard to quantify, but when your site’s traffic increase and sales increase for no other apparent reason, you’ll be very glad you took a long look at your visual design elements today!