Visual Design
How a product or technology appears to users
Why it matters
Visual design is the layer users judge in the first fifty milliseconds — before reading a word, they have already decided whether the product looks trustworthy, and that verdict colors everything after. It is not decoration on top of UX; type, color, and spacing are doing functional work: showing hierarchy, signaling what is tappable, setting tone. The tell of good visual design is that nobody mentions it — they just say the product feels solid.
The numbers
- 50 ms is roughly how long users take to form a first aesthetic impression of a page (Lindgaard et al.)
Related terms
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