The Next 100 Things You Need To Know About People: #103 — Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder’s Age, Gender, And Geography

Which of these search engine home pages do you find most visually appealing?:

Naver.com is the search engine for South Korea. Google is the search engine for lots of other places. Whether you found the Google design more visually appealing or whether you found the Naver design more visually appealing has a lot to do with how old you are, whether you’re a woman or a man, and where you live.

Katharina Reinecke and Krzysztof Gajos researched different visual designs around the world, with men and women of different ages. Here’s what they found:

• People over 40 preferred more colorful designs compared to younger people. This preference was even stronger among people over 50.
• Across all ages, women preferred websites that were more colorful than men did.
• Men preferred websites with a gray or white background and some saturated primary colors.
• Women preferred color schemes with fewer contrasting colors.
• People from Finland, Russia, and Poland liked websites without a lot of colors. People from Malaysia, Chile, and Macedonia preferred websites with a lot of color.
• People from countries near each other tended to like the same amount of colors. For example, Northern European countries didn’t like a lot of colors.
• People in English-speaking countries preferred more color than those in Northern European countries.

Takeaways

• If your target audience is primarily men, consider a white or gray background with a contrasting color.
• If your target audience is primarily women, consider using more color, but fewer contrasting colors.
• When you’re designing for a specific geographical area, make sure you’re familiar with the color and visual design preferences for that region.
• Test your visual design with your target audience.
• When you’re designing for a geographic area that you’re unfamiliar with, be sure to have someone FROM that area working with you

Here’s the reference for the research:

Reinecke, Katharina, and Gajos Krzysztof. 2014. “Quantifying Visual Preferences around the World.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

This post is from my newest book: 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People.