What’s more important: usability or design?

Usefulness or attractiveness? These two aspects have always been opposed and compared to each other as they are both equally important and  desired. Often times people face a choice whether to choose a beautifully designed website or the one that’s handy and easy to use. Here’s the thing. When you walk into the shop and see something attractive, your eyes automatically settle for it and you can’t just leave without making a purchase. Shortly after you may try the thing on and find out that it’s not that comfortable. And pretty soon, even the most appealing thing would be out of favor. The flaws would be more obvious and cogent. This example vividly pictures the contradiction between a useful things and attractive one. A nice-looking item can be absolutely unusable, similarly, a usable one may not look attractive for people’s eyes.

In every day’s life it’s not that critical and you can easily compromise one thing for the other one, but when it comes to business, no sacrifices are desired. How can you possibly give an answer to what to sacrifice – design or usability? That’s the biggest question!

Talking about the business world, if you’ve got a website, you may wonder how it should look. It goes without saying that the site should be user-friendly but at the same, it’s expected to have an appealing appearance so that it can instantly grab people’s attention.

This confusion can be eliminated if you firstly get the right idea what design and designing is. It’s not just the choice of colors, pictures and patterns. The concept of design encompasses so much more than that. The design is a much more meaningful concept. Unconsciously It touches all aspects of our life, arousing certain feelings and emotions.

Most people perceive web development and web design as two different concepts, and this is exactly where the problem lies. Actually, it’s impossible to develop a website without designing it first. A thorough planning of a project ensures its usability and quality. Web developers have to have a vision of a project at all its stages. Website functionality and usability are the responsibilities that web developers have to officiate. Without designing, web development would more than likely fail to succeed.

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