Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Superior

Re:Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Superior by bazzargh on Sunday January 26, 2014 @11:31PM (#7128818)

Nothing from "Why Simple is Scientifically Easier To Process" down is backed by any of the actual research papers he mentions. He's also mixing studies of (at least) two different things here. The Google and Harvard studies both looked at flashing up images of websites, and were about judging aesthetic appeal, not recall. Meanwhile, the papers on fluency are about recall of information presented (items on a restaurant menu, for example). The former set of papers don't mention any connection with Miller's 7+/-2. In fact, those papers don't posit a physical basis: they're empirical studies. This stuff about photoreceptors seems entirely irrelevant.

If you want to do something scientific, why not actually test your website? It's what the researchers in those papers did, but it's missing from his recommendations.

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Re:Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Superior by rmrfrmrf on Sunday January 26, 2014 @11:54PM (#7128889)

Maybe it's because SoshiTech is an inbound marketing/content marketing/content farm/black hat SEO website? I clicked on the "Apple" tag in the tag cloud and got back a list of completely unrelated posts. TBH I don't understand how posts like this get so far up the front page without some shenanigans going on.

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Re:Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Superior by tommycxl on Monday January 27, 2014 @03:11PM (#7132836)

Yes, this content was scrapped. (Hi, I published the article originally)

While I did re-distribute the content to Medium, we very much practice these principles where the post was originally published on ConversionXL

While the studies referenced do pull from different areas, "beauty", "retention", "conversions" they are all used in order to back up that science supports simple, prototypical, sites performing better.

This means less visual clutter, everything being where it is "supposed to be" and presented in a way that isn't over stimulating to the senses.

As far as the photoreceptors in your eyes are concerned, that's the bridge between the real world and your brain.

You don't actually "see" anything, your brain just decodes the information.

Less information to decode (i.e visual complexity) the easier the actual message has to get to your brain.

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