Is it important?

If it's important enough for you to spend your time finding and connecting with new people online, it's important enough to get the first impression right. There are no second first impressions.

The Power of Design 

Design is used as a tool to support the strategic objectives of a business. 

Design is used as a route to the emotions to help businesses meet the functional needs and aspirations of customers. The appropriate manipulation of the relationship between function and emotion adds value to a business and increases its performance by designing in greater usability, greater aesthetics and greater customer experience. 

Customer-centred design helps generate positive responses and meet, even exceed, the needs of a specific target market by designing-in features that bring real benefits to customers. The relationship between business and customers is enhanced. This mean not only attracting people but also retaining their custom. 

Design can also be used to improve staff morale and efficiency, in turn delivering enhanced customer service. 

Design plays a key role in customer's perception of quality and value. It can be used to reinforce or even alter the perception of a business. 

Design plays a key role in differentiation from competitors. It can be used to facilitate opening new markets and cementing existing ones. 

Why bother with quality design?

Thoughtfulness and processes that lead to user delight, that make it likely that someone will seek out a product, pay extra for it or tell a friend.

Here's what Steve Jobs thinks

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” — Steve Jobs