The Halo Effect and Why You Should Invest in a Beautiful Website

The Halo Effect describes people’s tendency to let one positive trait guide their total opinion of a person, product, or experience. While this cognitive bias is well known for it’s relation to attractiveness (for example people consider good-looking individuals more intelligent), it also has implications for customer experience.

1) Aesthetics matter

Studies have found that the attractiveness of a website affects users’ opinions on usability. A beautiful site with an unacceptable task failure rate will still get a high user satisfaction rating. Why? Because the aesthetics created a halo that overrode the functionality of the site.

2) Backed by research

When people like the design of a site, they rate the entire experience more highly. Researchers at The Decision Lab ran a study in which they showed users two login pages. Each page had identical functionality, but different levels of design. The researchers then asked users to rate the pages’ attractiveness.

When users liked the design of a page, they were more likely to rate it as intuitive, reliable, and secure. The difference between the perceived performance of each page was staggering. The attractive page was rated:

• 104% more reliable

• 37% more intuitive

• 152% more resilient to hacking

Why? It’s down to the powerful Halo Effect that design has on digital experiences. The more beautifully designed, the more functional an experience is perceived to be.