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CHAPTER ONE WHY DESIGN MATTERS
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The Layers of Design
It’s important to understand the layers that make up a design, because getting
those layers to work together is the key to creating designs that look good, that
solve problems, and that ultimately in uence your users.
On the web, more than anywhere else, using the layers of design appropriately
is critical to success. People are exposed to more information today than ever
before, and there just isn’t enough time or attention for us to process all of it.
So, we use shortcuts to decide what is deserving of our ever-more-precious
attention.
In psychology, these shortcuts are called heuristics. Heuristics help us solve
complex problems and make complex decisions by using “rules” that are either
programmed into us by evolution or learned from our own experiences.
If you see a pair of shoes that you’re considering buying, you’ll immediately
make a judgment on whether this brand of shoes is for you. How does the way
it’s constructed a ect the look of the shoes? Do the colors appeal to you? Is it
your style? You use heuristics based upon how similar these shoes are to shoes
that you’ve had past experiences with.
 ese heuristics are in heavy use as people make decisions on the web. We
make split-second judgments about how much we trust a news site to give
us accurate information, how much we trust an e-commerce site to process
our payments securely, or whether we believe a nonpro t will use our
money wisely.
It turns out, in all these cases, design is the single most important heuristic we
process when deciding whether a site is credible.
 e factors that in uence design are countless, with fuzzy boundaries. You
could ask a dozen di erent design experts what factors manifest themselves in a
piece of design, and although you’d get a dozen di erent sets of answers, they
would all pretty much cover the same things. Here are some of the layers of
design that I’ll talk about in this book.
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